But in that way, OL’ing is not terribly different than a lot of marginalized sports in this country that exist under literally identical conditions of few athletes, no access, etc.  And yet in some we succeed brilliantly; in others we medal sporadically (even one of our rowers won in Beijing and that sport is as niche as it gets).  Clearly if all the problems with OL’ing were related to the issues of the last two days it would cut universally across all niche sports and it does not.  There must be other factors at play and that’s the topic of today.

Because irrespective of all of the factors that exist to keep OL’ing no more than a niche sport in this country, there has always been a small group of elite lifters in this country, who despite the title of this series, have performed to varying degrees at the highest level, placing Top 10 (with a couple of guys coming close to cracking the medal stand, Barnett’s 4th in 1996 being the closest but I’ll come back to that below). 

These are the folks already in the sport so the discussion of the past 2 days doesn’t apply to them; they are the ones who have devoted their lives to the sport and reached at least a high enough level to make the big show to see what, if anything might be holding them back.

Is It Simply a Lack of Talent?

Perhaps the simplest answer to the problem with the elites that America has is that they simply may not have the talent to reach the highest level.  This is actually the place I am really in no place to comment.  Certainly, other big sports in this country do tend to draw top strength/power athletes for reasons I discussed at length and this is certainly part of it.

Even the niche sports that we have succeeded in such as cycling, swimming and speed skating aren’t sports where the folks going into those sports would have chosen much else.  It’s at least worth noting that all three have more of an endurance bent (where to a degree you can overcome genetics with sheer grinding volumes of work) and this does separate them from OL’ing with it’s specific set of physiological and technical requirements.  But, overall, the presence of the big three and track and field doesn’t seem to have explicitly kept other sports from at least occasionally reaching the medal stand and it’s a bit hard to see where US OL’ing would be held back specifically by this.

The same non-team sport middle-class types who seem to get involved in things like cycling, swimming and speed skating seem to have been the major players in OL’ing in this country and, again, it’s hard to see that they would explicitly lack the potential talent to succeed.  Though this may simply be an issue of numbers; as I’ve mentioned at the highest levels of sport you need a lot of factors, physiological, etc. to come together and the handful of folks entering the sport may simply be insufficient.

This is specially true given the amazing numbers that are being produced by other countries; it’s not even an issue of a single country producing all the top lifters; there are a solid half-dozen or more countries producing top lifters.  Just as it was in European cycling, the few Americans are competing with a depth that is hard to overcome no matter what. America has never done the testing, selection, etc. that other countries did, nor did we have the sheer number of people to throw at the sport.  So this is possible but hard to prove either way and, once again, I’m in no real position to comment here.

Let’s assume for the time being that this isn’t the issue and see what else might be going on with America’s elite lifters, mainly here I’ll focus on factors that others have commented on or suggested ‘fixes’ to to solve the problem.

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Out Lifters Simply Don’t Work Hard Enough

This was the first suggestion made by Hoffman when the US started slipping  in the 60′s, that the Europeans simply worked harder than American lifters.  At least similar ideas have been trotted out more recently but I’m not sure I buy it.  Certainly in the 60′s it’s arguable that American lifters might have been coasting a bit because they were so dominant; I think it’s more likely that they were just putting their effort into the wrong things.  They were focusing on maximum strength and such when the Europeans were staring to focus on constant technique practice and speed strength.   But I doubt they were doing anything but working their brains out.

And I’d make the same argument now for this simple reason: no athlete who reaches the International level, even if they never reach the truly highest level and medal, gets there by being lazy.  I discussed this in detail in the Talent vs. Work Series and I’d refer readers there.  But all athletes at that level are intensely driven to succeed and will pour blood, sweat and tears into their sport.  I just don’t buy that American lifters are inherently less driven to succeed anymore than I buy that white sprinters in high school aren’t driven; they work just as hard, they simply can’t compete with the West African blacks.

Our Lifters Have Lost Belief in Their Ability to Win

Another argument is one of motivation, this is something that Tommy Kono has gone on about for years and discusses in detail in both of his books.  His argument is that as Americans started to slip in the standings that their belief in their ability to succeed started to slip. 

Along with this appears to have come somewhat of a ‘culture of mediocrity’ in the sport where Americans simply settled for what they were capable of producing without hoping or aiming for more.  Certainly belief is huge in sport (as I discussed when I talked about Kenyan distance runners) and this could be contributing.   Because while believing you win won’t guarantee it, believing you’re going to lose pretty much does.

When being American National Champion puts you at the bottom of the leader board internationally, it’s hard to get past that.  And there does appear to have been some toing and froing with qualification standards in National Championships that may be related to this. 

But OL’ing is a sport that is pretty damn objective, you can lift what you can lift which is what you can lift.   It’s not a sport where you can suddenly make some monstrous improvement on the platform when you haven’t been doing it in the gym (nor is it a sport like running or cycling where tactics and other random factors can take someone to the front where you might not have expected it).  OL’ing is a pretty pure sport in this regard.

And simply, if you’re only capable of 180kg and the top 3 in your class open with 190kg, it’s not as if belief comes into it. Life still isn’t a Rocky movie and the objective nature of the sport makes reality reality.  And given the driven nature of athletes in all sports, I still have trouble accepting that Ol’er would just be giving up because of a lack of previous results.  That’s not consistent with the psychological profile of athletes, certainly not those who pursue something like OL’ing in the first place.

Our lifters are capable of what they are capable of and that’s what they are capable of.  Most athletes believe that they can succeed if they work hard enough and while it certainly can’t help confidence to know that your best day still puts you behind everybody else, I’m not convinced this is as big a deal as some make it.  I could be wrong.  Of course, all of that is predicated on being allowed or willing to push the limits and here there may be a real problem with the culture of weightlifting in this country.

They Don’t Push the Envelope

I do think it’s worth mentioning that there does seem to be a long-standing, how do I put this, hesitancy to really push the envelope in Olympic lifting among Americans although it’s hard to tell if this is a coaching issue or an athlete issue.  Charniga discusses this in Part 6 of his farticle series how lifters even during our heydey wouldn’t take their final attempt and go for a world record, presumably ‘saving’ it for another day.  Why is less clear, whether it was out of fear of injury or simply not seeing the need when they were so far ahead, I just don’t know. 

Charniga contrasts this to athletes from other countries routinely starting with weights far in excess of what they need to win.  And who routinely take all of their attempts to just set record after record (note that not everyone did this, Alexeev was famous for only beating his own world record by small amounts; but realize that he got paid every time he set a new world record.  He was just being crafty by allowing himself to break it over and over again).

It’s worth mentioning that in some training systems, notably the Bulgarian based ones, lifters are routinely training with or above their world records on a daily basis.  I’ll come back to training in a second but there is no doubt that many countries just push and push and push even in training and it’s possible that this is pushing them to higher levels (along with regular competition because NOTHING brings an athlete to a higher level than competition; you just can’t generate the same intensity under any other conditions).  Of course, injuries and destroyed lifters also come out of that system but that’s the price some are willing to pay to win.

Perhaps that’s a problem, America, for whatever reason isn’t willing to push it’s lifters to the point of near destruction with the kind of training needed to succeed at the highest levels; although what we do to other athletes (think football) would argue against that on a cultural level. 

I think it’s more likely that we just don’t have the numbers to take that kind of approach in the sport and have anybody left when the smoke clears.  It’s ok to destroy people when you have thousands to throw away; not so much when you have a couple of hundred and can’t lose any.  If there is any conservatism in how Americans approach the sport, it may simply come out of not having the lifters to sacrifice to the beast that is elite level OL training.

And certainly there does still seem to be an element of this hesitancy in  OL’ing.  I recall during Beijing, this may have been on a blog of one of the female lifters how she was basically forbidden by her coach to take anything but fairly conservative attempts that he knew she could make.  And on every level this makes no sense whatsoever.  

Now, I’m all for being somewhat conservative in training, hurting yourself doing something heroic there is kind of stupid.  But at the highest level of the sport, in a situation where a lifter is going to come in 15th place anyhow, what logic is there in not allowing them to go for it all on the Olympic stage with nothing to lose?  That I don’t get and simply can’t understand. 

I think I heard that the coach felt it was important for Americans to demonstrate our consistency by having the lifters make all their attempts.  Maybe when you’re in a situation with no chance of winning, consistency is the best you can shoot for.  Again, I don’t know although I wish I could know what the coach was thinking when he handed down such a stupid ass decree.

But this all sort of leads me to the next topic because while the above is certainly possibly part of the case, I still don’t think it’s all of it (and mind you, fixing it would still require getting the US to where it could perform so it’s a huge catch-22 situation.  If US lifters are being held back by their belief that they can’t do well, then they won’t ever do well enough to break that belief). But the final paragraph does point to a potential issue having to to do with coaching and training of our top lifters.

Because if the talent is presumably there, and there’s not some weird psychological block holding our lifters back, that doesn’t leave much as the target of the problems with our top lifters or why they aren’t getting where they need to be.  The first thing I want to talk about is the training/coaching issue although this gets embroiled with another important issue which I’ll talk about first.

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Support

Support for athletes encompasses a lot of different factors ranging from financial, housing, coaching, therapy, etc. And while it’s true that the majority of Olympic lifters train without much in the way of support, the fact is also that not all of them do. Because once athletes reach the top level of the smallest niche sports, they are often given the opportunity to go to the Olympic Training Center and enter the resident athlete program.

Said program provides support, housing, food (amusing story: the last time I visited the OTC there was a video asking resident athletes what the best part was and they all said “Having food cooked for me.”), training and coaching, sports science, etc. 

Mind you, athletes have to reach a certain level (usually unsupported during the entire time) to get into the resident program but it does exist. Certainly it’s nothing like the ‘professional athlete’ status that most Eastern Europeans train under but it’s better than nothing.  Once athletes have proven themselves as being worthy, they can get support to hopefully reach the next level.

And over the history of its existence, it’s basically failed to produce much, certainly we’ve had some decent finishes at the Olympic level (I haven’t really taken the time to delve into World Championship results) but no medals as I described.  For an affluent country with some of the best supposed ‘sports science’ and resources, it sure doesn’t seem to stack up against what small, broke-ass countries are doing with some basic equipment and well trained coaches.   This is a place where we’ve got all the tech, but everyone else has the results.

Now, there is no doubt that the OTC program has changed significantly over the years.  New coaches are brought in to try and generate results and much of what I’m going to write probably reflects more of the early goings on (much of what I’m going to write comes from Dreschler’s book published in 1998 and doesn’t reflect what is currently going on).   I’ve also heard stories coming out of the OTC from various sources, little of which has been positive and much of which gives me some pause.

Because at least for most of it’s history,  what happens at the OTC seems to cause more problems for its lifters than it solves (and the overall lack of results points to this) and this probably stems from a few different issues.  One of them is the decentralized nature of this country and the fact that every coach has his own way of doing things (in countries with more centralized coaching systems, everyone is coming from the same philosophical and/or coaching background). 

The nature of the OTC is that an athlete who may have been developed by a singular person (their personal coach) for the 5-10 years it took them to reach that level is now handed off to the National coach, a guy who has never worked with the athlete, who doesn’t know who they are, how they respond to training or anything about them. 

And, sadly, a lot of coaches have a fairly cookie cutter approach to training, giving it to all the athletes and then assuming that the athlete is the weak link if they don’t respond (this happened ALL the time in speed skating).  So the athlete may be thrown into a style or type of training that they have never been exposed to by a coach who doesn’t have the time nor interest to individaulize it and they get injured or what have you.  It’s not universal but it certainly happens.

This is compounded with a general fascination of Americans (including athletes and the federations) in certain sports with foreign coaches.  US Speedskating was notorious for hiring Dutch coaches for the National team (because the Dutch clearly have skating ‘secrets’) over Americans and USA WL’ing seems to have fallen prey to this to at least some degree.  So coaches such as Dragomir Ciroslan (the Ex-Romanian National Coach) are brought in and put in charge of the OTC athletes. 

And often don’t realize that our elites lack the years of systematic build-up or the background to handle what their elites did. Stories of athletes at the OTC having their training volumes and frequencied doubled or tripled almost overnight are common and you hear of athletes who developed training 4-5 times/week with their personal coach being destroyed by an Eastern Bloc coach (or ex-athletes) who simply has no concept of training without ‘support’ (many of the coaches from those countries are aghast to hear that they are expected to prepare top athletes without ‘support’; and yes, Virginia, support here means drugs).

I saw this happen in short-track speed skating when USS hired a Korean coach to take over the national team.  Now the Koreans are hardcore in short-track, they start as kids and subject their kids to the kind of child abuse that only a Communist country can generate.  By the time they are elites, the survivors are handling 6-8 hours of training per day but it took them a decade of selection (leaving destroyed athletes in the wake) to get there.  And the hired coach came in and put the American athletes on the exact same program, without recognizing that they hadn’t gone through the buildup.  It worked in his country, why shouldn’t it work here?   And the athletes were just blown up.

Even when that isn’t the case, American coaches, convinced that there are Eastern European sports secrets latch onto isolated concepts (such as depth jumps which ruined many a career in the 80′s) or training models without understanding them or the context in which they developed (i.e. thousands of athletes put through systematic multi-year training as professional athletes with constant therapy, regeneration and anabolics).  They apply the models uncritically to American athletes without that background and just destroy them.

And failing that, you still find coaches, from the old school who are married to what can only be called ‘outdated’ methods of training; older coaches who haven’t kept up with recent developments who are training folks lke they have been for 10-20 years. 

Because at least one place where a huge focus has been on the lack of success in American OL’ing is on the training and many have lamented the lack of a true American ‘system’ of training in the sense that other countries had one.   Which leads me into a tangent that I wish I could spend more time on but won’t; I’ve provided plenty of resources and this isn’t the place.

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On the Training of Elite Olympic Lifters

In one sense, training for the OL’s is simple, there are two competition movements and the goal is to lift the most one time. Like powerlifting, there are a minimal number of biomotor capacities that need to be developed maximally (I’d refer readers to The Sports, Training and Adaptation Continuums) and, in contrast to many other pure strength/power sports, OL’ing is one of the handful of sports where the weight training is the sport.

Historically, Ol’ing training has divided itself into two major camps, simply reflecting the two countries that were producing for the longest and represent the different ‘general’ philosophies of training.  Certainly every group has developed it’s own ‘flavor’ of training but there really is only so much you can do differently in the sport given the specialized nature of the activity.  And the two main ‘schools’ of training as they are typically delineated and described are the Soviet and Bulgarian methods which I will briefly describe.

Russia vs. Bulgaria: The Brawl to Settle it All
As noted above, these are sort of the two major schools of thought in the sport of OL’ing and I’m only going to look at them in precis to save space.  Note that body have generated champions so drawing conclusions about exclusive ‘bestedness’ is misguided.  Simply they each have their pros and cons, benefits and drawbacks.

The Soviet system coming out of it’s relatively less centralized system and multi-faceted training approached Ol’ing with a great variety of movements including variations on the Olympic lifts themselves (with much of the competition work being saved for later).  The system was based around percentages of maximum and periodization and tended to move from higher volume/lower intensity (which might have meant 6 sets of 3 at 75% not the silly bullshit American interpretation of this with 4 sets of 15 at 75% of max) to lower volume and higher intensity (singles at 90%+) as competition drew nearer. Lots of assistance movements were used to fix weak points and many feel that the Soviet system is applicable to a greater number of lifters because it allows more flexibility in the training.

In contrast Bulgaria under Abadjaev was all specificity all the time. He threw out 99% of the movements Ol’ers had used, using only 6 by the end of his heyday. Periodization was scrapped, he didn’t use percentages (weight adjustments were just flat reductions or increases of 5-20kg below or above maximum) and had his lifters train to a daily maximum (which is NOT the same as attempting your personal maximum daily, a nuance lost on most and which I should write a full article on) and mostly singles (with the occasional double were done).

He pioneered short intense workouts, working on a given lift for 30 minutes before taking a break, the competition lifts (or power versions) were trained in their full version multiple times daily. It’s often felt that this was mainly a way to control his athletes, that the system breaks people down, bores them to tears, injuries are not unheard of when you’re working at max all the time.  Mind you, Abadjaev didn’t care, he was going to win at all costs.

For those more familiar with powerlifting training than OL’ing training, the above basically comes down to Westside (tons of variety, don’t practice the full lifts much, fix weak points with special exercises) versus Metal Militia (specific, heavy work all the time and little else).

Which Is Best?
Which system is better? That debate has been raging for 30 years and both have produced champions. Certainly I think that most top teams have moved closer to a Bulgarian system than not.  Sports have changed since the Soviet heyday and most have moved to more specificity at competition intensity (and for all I know the Soviet system has changed in recent times, most of what’s available in the literature is older stuff from what they were doing in the 80′s).

It’s safer to say that each system has it’s pros and cons, benefits and drawbacks.   I’ll quote Glenn Pendlay from an article he wrote on the topic titled A Russian Perspective on the Bulgarian System, interviewing a former top Soviet lifter:

Do what works. The Russians believe their “system” works for a wider variety of people, and doesn’t produce as many injuries. But they, or at least Ruslev, agrees that the Bulgarian system is the “ideal” for a person with no weak points.

I’d only add that the Soviet system doesn’t seem to work so well if a lifter doesn’t have years under the bar; many find that doing nothing but broken or segmented lifts most of the time doesn’t prepare them for heavier loading in the full movement (many have found the same with Westside even in the relatively less technical powerlifts, the lack of heavy competition work doesn’t prepare them adequately for a heavy competition lift).  And the simple fact is that most are training the full competition lifts more and more frequently; for all I know modern Soviet training does too.

The Bulgarian system, at least at it’s full level, requires years of build-up to be survivable in the first place.  My friend who trains with Abadjaev notes that his program is far less voluminous than the ‘professional’ program (i.e. what Abadjaev feels is required to succeed at the highest level).  My friend is also not using ‘support’ (yes, I am coming back to this).

It’s interesting to note the big swing towards more specificity in training, even in powerlifting with systms like Sheiko, Korte 3X3, Smolov and others which are based around near daily practice of the powerlifts. Mind you, most of the above is somewhat historical even if many modern teams use some variant of the Bulgarian system in today’s era (where all sports have moved to much more specificity of training and away from the variety of the 80′s). 

Chinese Sports Secrets

I think it’s worth pointing out that, while very little information is available, the Chinese may have developed an ideal ‘hybrid’ system, eliminating the potential negatives of both the Russian and Bulgarian system while combining their strengths.  Not that there is much to be found about their system but they seem to combine daily near maximum lifting in the competition lifts with specific assistance work to focus on weak points (based on the coach’s eye) then supplemented with general bodybuilding work on the premise that a ‘bigger muscle is a potentially stronger muscle’.   This type of mixed approach may provide the best of all worlds.

Success Leaves Clues

But the above really only touches the surface, clearly there are a lot of countries doing at least somewhat different things even if most are derived from the above systems of training (simply, there isn’t that much variety to be had) in one fashion or another.  But it’s instructive to see if there are any commonalities in the training of elite Olympics lifters; I wasn’t joking at the start of this series with the trite ‘Success Leaves Clues’ phrase. 

Because while Americans (athletes and coaches alike) are often obsessed with finding Training Secrets, the secret is often that there is no secret (other than all the factors I’ve been discussing the past 7 weeks); looking at what all elite athletes are doing is often instructive.  Here again I’ll let Glenn Pendlay sum it up again quoting from his article.

…[H]ere is how the best are currently training. The minimum training sessions per week that I encountered was 5, maximum 12. Minimum hours spent training per week was about 8, maximum about 18. I did not talk to the Chinese, who I dont doubt top this number. Everyone snatches. Everyone clean and jerks. Everyone squats and front squats. Everyone does power snatches and power cleans. Most do pulls. Many do some sort of pressing or push pressing. This group of exercises makes up most of the work done. Many have some sort of exercise which they do which isnt as widespread, some do jumping exercises, some bench press. A few do some sort of good morning exercise or stiff legged deadlift variation. Some do some variation of back raise, back extension, or Glute Ham raise. In no instance which I encountered did these “extra” exercises make up any sigificant part of the training load. No one does only singles. No one does sets of 10. Most use a variety of reps between 1 and 5. Most do snatches and/or clean and jerks, or some close variation, every workout or almost every workout with significant weights.

And that really does sum it up and the key sentence is really that last one so far as I’m concerned. Because the technical nature of the lifts requires near daily practice in the lifts themselves, with the word ‘significant’ there being an older school term that you can translate as ‘heavy’. The OL’s change significantly when the weights approach max and training with 75-80% really doesn’t prepare lifters to handle max weights.  Everything else just supports that goal of endless practice and attempts to improve performance in those lifts.  So with that background, is there something wrong with how American lifters are training?

On the Training of Elite American Lifters
Here the completely decentralized nature of our country makes much in the way of discussion problematic.  Because outside of the USA Weightlifting coaching certification (which few seem to care about) there is no centralized approach to training. The handful of gyms that do exist all have their own way of going about things.  And it’s hard to say how much any of them, mostly run by guys who have been in the iron game for years and years have really kept up with the cutting edge of the sport. 

Here I truly am talking out of my own ignorance, I simply don’t know what’s going on outside of what little has been written, articles I’ve seen or what have you.  I would say that it’s clear that there are still some very silly and outdated ideas floating around.  Here are a few.

Quality Training
One of these actually comes from one of our greatest lifters, Tommy Kono to whom I mean no disrespect.  Critical of the European approach (based around the athletes training as professionals) he has long called for a return to what he calls Quality Training.  During his personal heyday, he trained like the lifters of the day with at most a moderate amount of training on the Olympic lifts themselves (perhaps three times per week) while pushing up strength in basic strength lifts. 

And certainly it worked for him during the time he was lifting.  And that style of training rapidly disappeared as being productive at the highest levels.  Note above that the minimum number of sessions per week is 5 (and you can be assured that the competition lifts are practiced at every one) and most do far more than that. The OL’s are too technical, too groovetastic at the highest levels to get by with that little practice on them.   Simply, nobody trains like that anymore.

Many guys lose their snatch groove with more than a day or two away from the lift (many elite Ol’ers will not only lift the day before competition but do a light workout the morning of to get their groove going).  While it’s debatable that American lifters should try to copy what the elite European block atletes are doing, returning to a system of training that worked 50 years ago is even more misguided.

Do It Conjugate Style/NEED MORE STRENGTH!!!
In what is now a rather famous series of articles (Milo Issues Vol 2/#3, Vol 3/#1 and Vol 4/#1), there is the suggestion by Louie Simmons to train effectively in the way he has instituted at Westside, arguing that American lifters are so far behind that they need to return to how the Russians were training in the 70′s and using what he interpreted the conjugate method as. 

To whit he suggested training the competition lifts between 65-85% of max and building up maximum strength through special exercises, building work capacity and ‘not training the competition movements too often’.  Effectively the exact opposite of how all successful teams of the day were training even in 1993.   And effectively moving training backwards to a style that didn’t work for the Americans in the 50′s and 60′s and that only roughly represented what the Soviets were actually doing (they certainly weren’t only training the competition lifts a couple times per week).

He holds up several flawed examples of why this should work (such as that America rules powerlifting, a sport that the rest of the world didn’t give a shit about at the time, and hence Westside is the best. It’s the World Series thing again.) that I won’t go into but he’s basically falling into the same trap that our lifters in the 60′s and 70′s (and coaches today such as Mark Rippetoe who’s comments are what started this stupid series) are still falling into: thinking that our lifters need MORE STRENGTH and that that’s what is holding them back.

Certainly, some of our lifters may be weak (or weak in certain areas) but as I detailed elsewhere (and Charniga goes into extensive detail on), maximum and limit strength are at most minimally related to performance in the lifts.  Strength needs to be kept at a certain level above competition performance to be sure but beyond that point, more strength not only doesn’t help but often hurts.  

That idea was out of date in the 60′s when the Eastern Europeans started handing us our asses and it’s no less out of date now.  Certainly the Chinese may be going heavier in assistance work than most have traditionally but how much of their training this comprises is hard to say (even the Soviets felt that up to 10% isometric and 10% eccentric work was useful back in the day).   But that’s only in conjunction with constant work on the competition lifts.

Now, admittedly these articles were written in the 90′s and I have no idea if Simmons would make the same arguments.  But it’s clear that style of training is even less relevant now with all elite competitors training in a fairly similar fashion which is constant work on the competition movements with everything else assisted that.  So what are Americans actually doing today?

The Current State of American Olympic Lifting
Here again I’m in no real position to comment except generally.  I asked Glenn about the current OTC program and was informed that it is certainly more like the current training of other country’s elite lifters than it may have been in the past.  He states:

As far as how this compares to the rest of the world, it’s in the ballpark of what everyone else is doing.  Obviously there are different “styles” of training and not everyone does exactly the same thing, but Zygmunt has worked with high level European athletes for 20-30 years and was an Olympian (for Poland) himself, and has imported the training system he used as the Polish national team coach, so the guys at the OTC are training at least similarly to the rest of the world.

Will this be sufficient to put one of our lifters in the medals before 2012 (Glenn joked that he hoped I finished this article series by 2012 so I wouldn’t have to rewrite it if we medalled)?  Time will tell and hope springs eternally at the very last it appears that the training of American lifters, at least at the OTC is at least in the ballpark of the rest of the world.   That’s at least progress from where it has been.

Beyond that I imagine that the long-standing gyms such as Calpains, Coffee’s and the rest are doing what they’ve been doing for quite some time. Which, at the risk of being blunt, hasn’t produced except perhaps to put athletes onto the Olympic team at the OTC.  Which hasn’t produced to date.  Whatever they have been doing hasn’t been working in terms of getting our lifters on the podium.

But that brings me to three more fairly recent developments in the climate of elite Ol training with the last one leading me into my final topic.   In order of what I know about them.

Jon Broz and Average Broz Gymnasium
Jon Broz has a training facility in the Vegas area called Average Broz Gymnasium.  I don’t know how much is really known about what he’s doing (he has at least one article on T-nation) but he does have at least one monster talent in Pat Mendes (you can see him on the BrozKnows Youtube channel).  Broz seems to be using the Bulgarian style system and Mendes has certainly put up some big numbers (though in recent competition he’s apparently far off his best lifts).  Time will tell and I don’t have much more to say about this.

Glenn Pendlay and California Strength
Coming out of Wichita Falls originally, Glenn (who I’d thank again for his invaluable feedback on this series) has set up an excellent situation for Ol’ers training with him at California strength.  By that I mean that he’s set it up so that lifters training there also ‘work’ at the facility, allowing them to be able to make a living while being able to train full time (and presumably without some of the politics, etc. that goes on at the OTC).   He seems to be using more of a Soviet style program with his lifters but you can check out his website for both regular blogs about their training along with video.

The facility also works with athletes from many other sports such as football, it’s not just pure OL’ing.  This not only allows it to keep it’s doors open but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of those athletes at least consider OL’ing as a fallback or alternate sport.  Glenn has been producing many of the US’s top lifters at the World level for now and this is certainly progress.

Ivan Abadjaev
I mentioned in an earlier part of this series that Abadjaev currently resides in California and has started training people again, presumably with the idea that he can recreate the magic of his heyday with American lifters.  There are a number of reasons that I doubt this can or will occur (primarily that he doesn’t have the numbers he needs to throw into the grinder and the lifters he will get will either be starting too old or not have the multi-year buildup to handle the full program) but he is in the country and the potential is there, I suppose.  Mainly my mention of him acts as a bridge to my final (at last) topic.

Because among other topics that Abadjaev is exceedingly open about is this: to prepare an elite Olympic lifter, to be able to handle the training required to reach the highest levels or become a champion requires the use of drugs (I’ve mentioned repeatedly how foreign coaches are stunned that they are expected to prepare American lifters clean; the entire idea is just insane to them).  And now it’s time to talk about the white elephant in the room.

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Drugs and Olympic Lifting

The topic of drugs in elite sport is always contentious for reasons I discussed in a previous section of this series.  Because while many sports fans take the idea that drugs are only used by guys who can’t succeed other ways, Americans take this to the mental level that we take anything, simply refusing to accept the reality of the situation.  We believe that only the weak use drugs and that hard work should be able to overcome anything.

And the reality is that Olympic lifting has had a perennial drug problem.  I already mentioned that I have it on good authority that American lifters were using the earliest anabolics and there’s simply no doubt at this point that the Soviet sports machine, GDR, Bulgaria and others systematically used drugs to support the training that was being done.  And while I don’t know what sport has generated the most positive drug results in the Olympics, I’m guessing weightlifting is up there.

And before you argue that this is a leftover of the olden days consider that for Beijing both the Greek and Bulgarian teams got popped for drug use going into the games.   Greece was able to pay the $500,000 fine and send it’s B-team but Bulgaria neither had the money nor the B-team and wasn’t able to compete (there have been other recent drug busts as well).   Drug use has been part of the sport for most it’s existence and nothing has changed.

In fact, the whole drug issue led to a few interesting occurrences in the sport. Because in the early 90′s, due to pressure from the IOC to clean up it’s act, Ol’ing did crack down on drug use.  And it appears to have gone down as evidenced by the fact that suddenly the top lifters or countries were about 5% off of the previous world records.  They just couldn’t hit the numbers clean.

In fact, in a roundtable on the topic of Olympic lifting in the pages of Milo (Volume 2/#1), it was estimated that anabolics gave roughly a 5-10% benefit with at least half or more of that being retained even if the drugs were dropped.  Which coincided exactly with what lifters were doing relative to the previous world records: they were all about 5% off their previous best.   And it’s hard to see how guys had gotten worse as lifters from their previous performance.

If there was any clearer indication of the impact of the drugs on performance (if for no other reason than allowing lifters to recover from the training loads being used), that was it.  It’s similar to the slower speeds and changed dynamics of the Tour De France this year; the top guys are all going slower and unless you want to believe that they backslid in terms of talent or training, the only logical conclusion is that they are using less drugs.

And this led to a problem because people watch the Olympics to see records being set and the fact was that lifters simply couldn’t reach the previous levels without drugs.  And the solution that International Weightlifting came up with was to simply throw out the old weight classes and effectively ‘reset’ the world records to zero so that new records could be set again. And the situation rapidly returned to where it was before.

There are two other interesting facts that came out of this.  The first is that arguably the US’s best recent finish in men’s weightlifting, Wes Barnett’s 4th in 1996, came during this period when, at least to a first approximation the competition was a lot cleaner than they had been.   Because this is a place where US lifters do seem to be a massive disadvantage compared to the rest of the world and this can be traced directly to the US Weightlifting federation. 

Because as one of it’s explicit goals for USA WL’ing is to make sure we don’t get dragged into the morass of drug use.  And accordingly US lifters are some of the most tested of any athlete in the world, subject to constant random testing.  And, simply, in the climate of international Ol’ing, given what we know other countries have been and are doing, how the records have been set and what the sport requires at the utmost levels, this is a huge roadblock.  Simply, other countries have state sponsored drug programs to support professional athletes; our enthusiastic amateurs are expected to reach the top level clean.

And this has led to another simple suggestion, just give our lifters more drugs.  But there is even indication that this wouldn’t be sufficient.  For in the same issue of Milo further analysis of American results even in the ‘cleaner’ days of the early 1990′s showed that we were so far behind (roughly 10-20% behind the leaders depending on the weight class) that even adding the supposed 5% gain from drugs would have only moved us from bottom of the heap to middle of the heap.   I don’t know where we stand now in terms of actual poundages relative to the top guys but I would be surprised if it’s changed much.  We may have a drug gap in the sport but clearly it’s not all that’s holding us back.

Because at the end of the day, there is no singular factor that can be identified in all of this.  Which brings me to endgame.

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Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting

And believe it or not, that’s the end.  I’ve covered too much information, this got stupid early on and I just rolled with it because I was having fun rambling about irrelevant shit and making jokes about the French and soccer.  I’m not even sure I really answered the original question, at this point I’m not sure what the question was.  Something about Olympic lifting.  And clearly the sport of Olympic lifting in this country has problems. 

But I don’t think that they are simple problems or that there is a simple solution.  Frankly, the idea that there could be a simple solution to something this complicated sort of points to part of the problem: Americans are simple people, we want complicated problems to have simple, solitary fixes.  It’s just this fundamental part of our nature.  We want the problem to be simple so that we can fix it overnight.  Just add _____ and suddenly the problem is solved.  If only.

That’s fundamentally the reason I spent so much time trying to show how there is this vast interconnected web of events that both produces and destroys sports performance.  All of the sociological, economical, ideological, genetic, physiological, etc, etc, etc, stuff that I covered when I looked at the countries and systems producing consistent results.  Even the exceptions seeing how sports seemed to survive and thrive despite not having everything in place at first glance.   What is needed to generate sports success isn’t simple, nor is what prevents it.

And what is wrong with the sport of Olympic lifting in the US isn’t simple.  Certainly getting more athletes is a huge part of it, you need that to find the talent.  And it has to be found young.  That requires facilities, coaching, incentives, money, support, a federation that does more than nothing. 

More than anything it requires interest.  But that ties in with our country as a whole, the way America developed, the way our people think, the way our culture developed.  It ties in with the sports that we watch and don’t watch, like and don’t like, get and don’t get, the sports we will and won’t invest money in.

And at a first glance, Olympic lifting has literally everything against it from both a competitor and athlete point of view.  The nature of the sport, the nature of the lifts, the nature of the lifters, the existence of not only the big three and track and field but simpler, easier sports like powerlifting and bodybuilding which fulfill American’s weightlifting mentality to a far greater degree.    They are hard to learn, few can teach them in the first place, they require specialized equipment, they don’t get you jacked or lean or strong.  In a quick fix capitalist society they have little appeal to either the athlete pursuing sport for a better life or the gym rat looking to get more chicks or impress his buddies. 

We have no heroes, our brief dominance of the sport is forgotten by all but the few who already pursue the sport and they aren’t the ones that need to be convinced.  But getting America to care would require so many things to happen all at once. Winning for one.  But even that might not be enough if the hero wasn’t the right kind of hero.  Even with that, the nature of the sport just makes it intractable for most people.  Olympic lifting literally addresses none of these issues and that’s not even considering the competition, countries who exist to throw people at the sport in immense numbers with immense support. 

Our small group of elites have struggled against all of this and more, toiling with no support, no money, training at the handful of facilities run by coaches who truly do what they do for the love of the sport.  Once these athletes, effectively enthusiastic amateurs, get far enough they can go to the OTC and get some support in a program that, historically not only hasn’t produced but may have done as much harm as good.  Still they soldier on, truly for the love of the sport. 

There are also the realities of the sport in terms of drug use, a place where the federation seems to be actively holding the lifters back with constant drug testing, preferring to stick their head in the sand regarding the realities of high level sport and Olympic lifting at the international level.

To ‘fix’ Olympic lifting you’d have to change all of this and more to make a dent in the problem which means solving the problems more or less all at once.  Just throwing money at it won’t solve the problem.  Just throwing drugs at it won’t solve the problem.  Just building gyms won’t solve the problem.  Just getting a bigger deadlift WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM.  Because the problem runs so much deeper than any of those simple things even if simple (and simplistic) minds can’t see that.

At the same time, there is some indication of change in the winds. Crossfit has done more in the last two years for the sport than lifters or the federation did in 40 years, the momentum is gaining and both the sport and interest in it is growing.  Down the road this might increase the numbers sufficient to find the talent needed to change things.  New coaches dedicated to the cutting edge of training such as John Broz and Glenn Pendlay may be the ones to find the talent, the hero that we need.  Even the OTC seems to be working at a better level than it once did even if the rest of the sport is still a total mess.

So maybe things can change, at least they are moving forwards rather than standing still or moving backwards as they have been.  I doubt it will happen soon but as other examples have shown, sometimes it only takes that single strike of lightening.  The right athlete with the right story at the right time and maybe it turns itself around.  Maybe.

Do I really think it will happen?  If I’m honest, I’m not optimistic which is why the one thing I didn’t do was offer my own simple ‘fix’ to the problem.  I simply don’t think one exists.  And that’s not just a copout, that’s my honest opinion.  There’s too much wrong with the sport in this country to fix it simply.

I also don’t buy the ‘anything is possible’ argument because it sounds like naive optimism to me, just fantasy level hopes and dreams by people with their heads in the clouds (it’s like that flying unicorn that shits gold I’ve been hoping to find).  But this isn’t just me being a killjoy, this is what I hope was an objective look at the realities of the sport in this country lead me to conclude.  I’m not writing it just to shit on people’s parades, it’s just the situation as I see it. 

I’d love to be proven wrong. 

Because I like the lifts, I know the lifts, I missed doing them in SLC, I miss doing them now.  Having been involved in my share of niche sports over the years and knowing people who pursue Ol’ing with great zeal at varying levels, I’d love to see things change even if my inherent pessimism (I prefer to call it realism) tells me that it won’t any time soon.  There’s just too much wrong with the sport on every level and it would all have to change at once for the sport to return to anything close to what it was.

And that, at long last, is Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting.

Sources
For an early roundtable (circa 1993) on many of the issues surrounding OL’ing (that still exist today), I’d point readers to Milo Issues Volume 2, Issue 1 through Volume 2, Issue 3 or so.  The roundtable on the drug issue is in Volume 2/Issue 3.
The Effect of Testing for Performance Enhancing Drugs on the Progress of World Records in Weightlifting by Andrew Charniga, Jr. Another perspective on the drug issue in the sport of Olympic weightlifting.
Weightlifting Olympic Style and Championship Weightlifting by Tommy Kono.  Both books talk about Quality Training as well as Kono’s belief about US Lifters Mentality of Failure in terms of their competition results.
Again, I’d thank Glenn Pendlay for answering my constant stupid questions throughout this.

And at the risk of crashing my server, comments will be opened on this piece.  I’ve turned off moderation because I won’t have the time, energy nor interest to attend to them.  Nor will I join in any debates on what I’ve written.  I’ve said what I have to say and I’m as exhausted from writing this as you are reading it.   End of line.

A Lack Of Incentives

It’s hard to say what problem to Ol’ing is THE biggest problem but certainly this is one of the biggies, especially given the nature of sport in America, the nature of who enters our sports and the nature of their drives to do so.  Simply, the total lack of incentives to pursue OL’ing is almost all that it takes to kill the sport completely. Because without incentives on some level, it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see success in sport.

Even with all of the other factors that may have contributed to our success in the 50′s, at least when Hoffman was running things, there were some incentives; athletes were being supported and there were at least some incentives (like magazine coverage or what have you). Athletes weren’t making scads of money but there was some benefit to being involved in the sport (if nothing else they got to travel).

Now there is nothing. No money to be had, no scholarships to be earned and only the top lifters travel (usually on their own dime) overseas to get destroyed by guys with unpronounceable names who warm-up with weights heavier than our guys lift (in an old Ironmind training tape, Strossen points out that Dimas is power snatching a weight heavier than the best US lifter in his class does in competition). And they only get to do that after the pursue the sport on their own for years to reach that level. There is simply no reason to pursue the sport outside of a deeply seated internal drive to do it.

Mind you, other sports have gotten past this, I mentioned three in swimming, cycling and speed skating, all sports pursued almost exclusively out of some psychotic individual drive (swimming had the collegiate benefits but most didn’t pursue it for that since they could go to college already).

But those sports all had some idiosyncrasies that I mentioned yesterday in terms of the age thing that allowed those self-motivated athletes to succeed in a way that Ol’ers have not.  Probably just the age thing (for skating and swimming) and the low-technical/high-physiological demands of cycling where a guy starting at 18 can sometimes get there.

In OL’ing, certainly masters lifters have the internal drive but it doesn’t matter when you’re years past your peak of strength and power. And the kids entering the weight room may have just as much focus and drive but it’s not going into Ol’ing. For a lack of exposure, for a lack of interest, for a lack of incentives.

Simply, what’s the incentive for a young potential to pursue OL’ing in this country? In Communist countries it’s getting to eat and travel as per the story I related oh so long ago, or to be completely supported, to be a national hero, to get seriously paid for medalling. This is motivation on an epic scale and I’d mention again the statistic that it’s exclusively non-affluent countries winning medals in the sport. In this country there is no money, no scholarship nothing except, well….nothing.

What are you going to tell a promising athlete: “Hey, guy, you can spend the next 15 years of your life living in poverty to pursue a sport nobody cares about or has even heard of and if we do everything right you might come in 14th to a bunch of guys whose names you can’t pronounce from a country you couldn’t find on a map. Or you can be a 4th string football player and still make a ton of money and get chicks. Or just bodybuild and get buffed without the hassle of this insane sport.” For 99% of kids, it’s not even a choice.

Proposed Solution: Offer Incentives
Again, a big duh solution. But while this is obvious in premise, it’s a bit harder to put into practice. That is, what would you offer? Outside of the big three (money, fame) and track and field (college) what do the other niche sports I talked about potentially offer?

For speedskaters, the only incentive is the potential of a gold medal since it’s not a professional sport; a handful of athletes have gotten sponsorships and made some money but they are the exception to the rule. And it was only after they won gold in the Olympics. And even that sport is dying due to the loss of the midwest enclave; now the incentives in the sport are for top rollerskaters to switch to ice to get to the Olympics (an option not available in their sport) and time will tell if it’s enough to keep the sport alive.

The same is basically in place for swimming (again, college is one outcome but most come from a socioeconomic background that this is secondary), the only real incentive is the Olympics. For cyclists, there’s now money and collegiate scholarships to be had but the athletes pursued it long before that; it also had that big European professional draw where you might go overseas and turn pro.

One suggestion made to me (by a friend, a coach and lifter) was to establish a high-school and/or collegiate branch of the sport. Kids love competing (amusingly, powerlifting is massive at the high school level in some states, Texas is one of them) and some kids don’t like team sports.  Setting up a high-school Olympic lifting program might be one way to do it.  Most schools already have a weight room and if the football, etc. teams are already doing the OL’,s bumpers and stuff are there.  You’d have to get some decent coaching and generate interest but the potential might be there.

And that might lead logically into a collegiate division. If there were at least some carrot on the end of the stick for wannabe Olympic lifters, a reason for kids with the talent or potential to pursue it (i.e. if they aren’t drawn to one of the big three or track for some reason), that might be enough to draw folks into the sport.

Especially that same specific underclass that has already shown quite the propensity for speed, power and explosion and who one might expect to do extremely well at the sport if they only had a reason (and resources) to pursue it in the first place (and education is clearly enough of a draw for some sports). But this would also entail a huge number of factors to change including facilities (like high schools, most colleges have equipment for the OL’s as part of the sports program), providing coaching, creating a competition circuit that folks cared about, etc.

Of course, you’d have to make it worthwhile for the colleges to give a damn and that ties in with the next factor. In a capitalist country, people do not do things out of the good of their own hearts. They do it because they are going to get something in return. And that something is usually exactly one thing: money.

Which brings me to the next factor, one which has often been thrown out as another ‘simple’ solution to the woes of OL’ing.

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A Lack of Money

Like most amateur sports there is no money in Olympic lifting. None.  That means no resources to get new equipment, not to build new facilities, not to train coaches, or put in grassroots development, not to do much of anything. Generally speaking, the athletes are broke, the coaches are certainly broke (you don’t become an OL coach to become rich, that’s for damn sure; figure skating on the other hand), and if other niche sports federations are any indication, I imagine the federation is broke.

Because the federations of small non-producing sports are being funded through the USOC which has to decide what moneys it has go where and in what amounts.  And that generally means funding sports that are producing.  And yes I realizes that chicken and egg/cyclical nature of this; underfunded sports don’t generally produce and their lack of production means less money which means.

Though mind you sports such as cycling did produce, as did speedskating despite being perpetually underfunded and incompetently run. Clearly the lack of money in OL’ing is part of the problem but it can’t be all of it or it would impact on every sport equally.  Speedskaters and cyclists certainly often come from at least a middle class white background but there’s still no real money in the sport and they still produce.

Mind you, in most ways this is no different than most amateur sports in this country where it’s broke-ass athletes pursuing their sport out of pure dedication in hopes that they can get to where they want to go (generally the Olympics). I don’t honestly see OL’ing as being too different from a lot of marginalized sports but again this is somewhat of a change from our heyday.

Because for at least a short period of time, Hoffman was supporting athletes and putting money into the sport during that brief period; of course he had his own financial gains to be realized from it (through the sales of his magazines, products). We might compare this to bodybuilding of today, it’s a sport where only a select few make money.

But magazines are happy to sponsor athletes who can pimp their product or equipment which is then sold to the thousands of wannabes who think that the pill or the gloves or the Otomix ™ shoes are what made their heroes jacked. That’s the basic model of a lot of sports: give the pros money to endorse product to sell to the masses of wannabes.

It’s capitalism pure and simple and it was effective when OL’ing was popular enough to have at least some ‘masses’ to sell too. And even then it was tied in strongly with the strength training and bodybuilding of the day as much as it was pure OL’ing; again there simply wasn’t quite the clear distinction then that exists today in the weight room.

But in the current climate of this country, that’s no longer the case.  Olympic lifting, bodybuilding and powerlifting are all separate distinct sports (though bodybuilding and powerlifting have some crossover) and OL’ing is the odd man out. First and foremost we don’t have champions to endorse; more importantly there are no masses of up and coming Olympic lifters to buy products if there were. What are you going to sell? Shoes? Singlets? Knee wraps?  Right.

Which isn’t to say that a lack of money is the problem, but I don’t see that it’s all of the problem.

Proposed Solution: Throw Money at the Sport
This is probably one of the most often/simple suggested solutions to the sport. Certainly, some degree of financial support would allow the athletes that we do have to not have to scrape and scrounge to make a living while they attempt to train (I would note the existence of the OTC program which I’ll talk about later).

Would that be enough to let them reach the topmost levels of the sport? I’m really in no position to really comment here.  My gut says no, it hasn’t held back other sports or athletes and I suspect that other issues are still at work here.  But let’s assume it would solve the problem, or at least help, just for a second. But here’s the important question: assuming it would fix things, where’s the money going to come from?

I don’t know much about the USA Weightlifting federation (though what little I’ve heard is not positive), I imagine that like the federation of many US sports, it’s fairly broke and doens’t have cash to put into anything (not that it would matter).  Again, not something I know about. I can comment here on speedskating again, who’s federation was perpetually broke as hell.  I could tell tons of stories but won’t to save space.  Bottom line: the federation is out.

What about government money, or maybe lottery money like in the UK? Good luck with that given the financial situation in this country along with what folks would see as far more worthy endeavors (assuming you could get it to use in the first place). Cycling is huge in the UK, the interest in the sport was there (and the talent in a relatively non-technical sport was also there, in an event that they thought they could win without dealing with the drug issue, and I’ll come back to that tomorrow) and it made sense to apply the Lottery money to track cycling (other big sports in the country were already well funded). That doesn’t apply to US Ol’ing, not with just as many other sports begging for the same cash. Assuming it was available, OL’ing would have to prove that it was more worthy than a dozen other underfunded amateur sports. Next.

What about finding private sponsors? They do exist, for example, in something I left out of the cycling articles (because I hadn’t read Team 7-Eleven: How an Unsung Band of American Cyclists Took on the World – and Won by Geoff Young and Jim Ochowicz yet), one of the earliest US Pro Teams got a huge financial windfall from 7-11 prior to the 1984 games.  7-11 was expanding and wanted to support the US Olympic effort, pouring money into the track velodrome and sponsoring a team to help not only advertise their business but try to change folk’s attitudes about the crap they sold. But that was a situation of a huge company looking to expand with the Olympic on the roster as a springboard. And the economy was way different in the 80′s and everybody was making bad choices fueled by cocaine and hookers.

It’s not unheard of for rich altruists to throw money at a pet sport, it certainly happens overseas with cycling crazy businessmen from time to time. Maybe USA WL’ing needs to find themselves an OL’ing obsessed sugardaddy. Let Donald Trump train with the team, something like that.  I’d suggest a wealthy Arab oil magnate but they will be supporting the Iranian and other teams (or in the US mind, Al Queda).

Of course, it’s optimistic as hell to think that what happened in US cycling recently could happen in OL’ing, didn’t money come into that sport?   Well, yeah but folks seem to have cause and effect confused. Certainly Lance through his force of will (and having shown he could produce) got money to sponsor US Postal but he also produced almost immediately (and there was the history of the 7-11 team).  But it was his victory that brought money into the sport, not the money that let him win.

And that brings me to what I personally think may be the biggest thing holding OL’ing back. 

The Lack of Interest

At the end of the day, everything I’ve discussed is part of what’s going on.  Because just as success in sport is predicated on a vast interconnected web of things to go right, there’s a lot going wrong in the sport of Ol’ing.  No facilities, no competent coaching, lifters getting pulled into other sports, no kids getting into the sport, it’s all relevant (and I’ll talk about our current lifters tomorrow when I wrap up). But I see that all as a symptom of the bigger, more deeply seated issue. which is this: nobody but the people involved in the activity already give the first flying fuck about Olympic lifting.

And that is a function of a lot of things, not the least of which is America as a whole which is why I spent so long on the sociological and economic and other aspects of this country.  And the following is not meant to be sarcastic, humorous or derogatory. I’m just stating facts (as I see them) in a factual way.

We are a form over function society, things have to look a certain way to engage us and we are all about appearance over anything else. We are a convenience culture. If something can’t be done or accomplished easily and quickly, we’re not interested.  We are a quick fix society, if something isn’t taken care of immediately (or faster) we are not interested. You see this in sports all the time, a failing team brings in a new coach or strength and conditioning guy and gives them one year to turn it around. If he doesn’t, he’s fired.  We are a capitalist society, if something doesn’t produce (and that means earning money), we don’t give a damn about it. What earns money is good, what does not earn money is not. QED.

Basically, the entire structure of our country, the sports we will and won’t watch, the athletes we will and won’t get behind, the sport we do and do not get, all comes out of our brief history, our overarching ‘culture’ (inasmuch as there is one) and all of that sociological bullshit I spent so many days on contribute to the overarching problem with the sport of Olympic lifting.

All of that adds up to a niche sport populated primarily with lifters too old to accomplish anything, a handful of junior lifters and even smaller group of elites who are struggling to survive against a world throwing absurd resources and people at this sport.   And while other sports have seemed to deal with the numbers issue somehow (due to the oddities of those sports), I think that’s a big part of what’s holding OL’ing back. 

We have too many other sports pulling the truly potential greats into the sport (a problem that cycling, swimming and speed skating didn’t have; those guys didn’t want to pursue anything else), the guys pursuing lifting for the sake of lifting pick easier stuff.  That leaves the ‘leftovers’ to pursue OL’ing.

And solving that problem means changing the overall climate of OL’ing in this country.  Basically, you have to make people care about the sport again.  Because there’s no point in even trying to solve the other problems, building facilities, training coaches, any of it until you have bodies to throw at the sport and have someone to coach.

You have to either get the American sport fan to care about the sport or, more usefully, get the average gym rat to care about these odd looking lifts. Because until you convince the average gym lifter that the OL’s will get him big guns, get him lean, get him the ladies or something else that targets the male insecurities he’s trying to compensate for, it’s not going to take. Remember, most people who lift don’t give a shit about athleticism.

To get any sort of money or incentives in the sport means getting the general American public to care. Otherwise you can’t get endorsements, TV coverage, collegiate coverage (the big sports in colleges are the ones that earn revenue for the university through merchandise and ticket sales).

Fundamentally, to solve the global problem in OL’ing you have to make people care. And therein lies the problem for reasons I will now explicate.

Proposed Solution: Make People Care About the Sport
Again, a big duhh solution but the issue here is not in the premise of the solution but how one might go about it in practice. Because of who I am I’m mainly going to look at what I see as the hurdles that the sport would have to overcome to make people care (and I’ll wrap up to day by talking about one of the recent developments in the sport that may have the potential to change things).

Because clearly up until this point nobody has been able to make the US lifters or sporting public aware of the sport.  I don’t know what the federation is doing but whatever it is, it isn’t working.  Because while other sports like swimming and speed skating live in obscurity most of the time, Americans do watch them when the Olympics are on.  And cycling is now televised because people care about the sport.

I would point out that, even during the heydey of American OL’ing, the majority didn’t care about it.  It was just that niche group of folks in certain areas that were interested, the general public would not have been aware of it nor cared.  TV coverage wasn’t what it was today and nobody would have given a damn anyhow.  And nothing has really changed since then.  Even during the Olympics, about the only way to get coverage of the Ol’s is through specialty websites.

Because one of the sillier arguments I’ve seen regarding OL’ing and how to get both lifters and sportsfans interested in the sport is to put it on TV, said argument I will come back to at the end of the day.   But this assumes that people would watch if it were on.  Because while Americans will watch a lot of stupid stuff on sports (see: The ESPN Crossfit games which were shown yesterday on ESPN2), there is stuff that we just won’t watch in large numbers.  So let’s look at how the average American is going to perceive OL’ing.

The Sport: Part 1
First let me be a bit silly but the names of the lifts are not helping.  When a newscaster says “Oh, will you look at that beautiful snatch” Americans giggle (or get offended due to our Puritanical attitudes towards sex).  Hell, I giggle and you’re giggling too.  The clean and jerk sounds like something you do in the privacy of your own shower, not something you do for competition (outside of some weird German or Japanese porn).  But this isn’t changing and I only bring it up for completeness.

If you’re not an afficionado, the sport is intractably boring to watch for more than about 5 minutes.  Because after you’ve seen one snatch, you’ve seen them all (see, you’re giggling).  Nothing changes, it’s the same thing with guys lifting progressively heavier weights over and over again, sometimes they make the lift, sometimes they don’t.  Next.   Powerlifting is the same, mind you and Americans don’t watch that either unless they are involved in the sport.  I always tell people to take a book with them because after you’ve seen the first three squats, it’s the same boring shit for the next 4 hours.  Contrast that to something like strongman (which we will watch) with 5-10 different events that are all different.

The Metric Issue
Coupled with this is the metric issue  and here I’m half joking and half not joking. Not only does the US have an issue with metric in general, there is the simple fact that we don’t get it and the numbers don’t seem that impressive (I’ve joked that lifting is easier in metric because it’s easier to add 10 of something than 22 of something, that is 10kg vs. 22lbs). 

Watching dudes jump weight by 2.5 kg is also problem for us because a) what’s a kilogram b) 2.5 isn’t very much is it?  Most gym rats slap on 25′s or 45′s.  2.5′s are for pussies as any powerlifter will tell you.  Even knowing it’s 5.5 lbs doesn’t help, it’s still a pitiful weight to add to the bar.

And the numbers just don’t sound impressive to us.  Not only do we not know what 180kg is but 180 isn’t a big number, my sister weighs more than that.  Hell, even 220kg isn’t a big number.  Sure, it’s 480 pounds but it will still always sound lighter than a 400 pound bench press, even if it’s not.  Because 400 is bigger than 220 and Americans are not a nuanced people. 

By the time lifters start hearing about 800-1000 pound squats and deadlifts (hell, there is a 1000 lb bench press), the weights used in OL’ing sound like warm-up weights.  Yes, I know it’s ignorant as hell.   It’s also true.  Putting the weights in pounds might help but that’s never going to happen outside of high school weight rooms.

Hell, look at strongman again, the weights make sense and sound amazing.  Watch them describe the stone weights.  150 lbs, 200 lbs, 300 lbs, this rock has never been lifted by a human being EVER but this big dude is going to try.  The weights make big jumps and the numbers sound amazing. OLin’g can’t compete with that in a conceptual sense because the numbers sound too small and the jumps between weights are too small (He just set a new world record by 0.5 kg.  0.5?  Are you kidding me?)

The Competitions
The sport is intractably confusing, the rules don’t make sense to anybody but afficionados and even folks who know what’s going on can’t tell why one lift is passed and another isn’t.  Like many sports (including PL’ing) OL’ing is contested one at a time with this weird structure of lifting where lifters sometimes follow themselves, you can’t tell who’s ahead and you don’t find out who wins until the end (even PL’ing with it’s flights has a slight advantage here since the guy lifting at the end of the flight is clearly lifting more).  Again, contrast that to strongman where at least some of the events are head to head and you know who’s winning and who’s losing.

It doesn’t help that nobody ever gets ruined in OL’ing, injuries in competition are fairly rare and minor.   A pulled hamstring, the occasional dislocation, sometimes someone drops a bar on themselves or passes out.  But it’s pretty rare.  Guys tear biceps in strongman, get the hell torn out of their arms with the stones.  Americans do love destruction.

By the criteria I laid out earlier, Ol’ing is not a sport that we ‘get’ in this country. As I noted above, I would note that powerlifting is also in this category and nobody in this country except lifters gives a damn about it. And it’s not shown on TV either (because nobody would watch). In contrast, strongman is shown on TV because the competitions make sense to us.  Most events are head to head, the guys are big manly man doing big manly things with rocks and trucks and shit. And they look like they are working their balls off the whole time. C’mon, look at this nonsense, this is an American sport.

The Lifts
While the names of the lifts don’t help in getting us to appreciate the sport beyond infantile giggling, there is another issue that I think contributes to this which is the go/no go nature of the lifts.  Because it makes the effort just not look that difficult to the average viewer.    Look, before the OL’ers freak out, you and I both know that they are impossibly hard. But they don’t look it.

There’s no struggle, no suffering, even in the Dimas snatch video from last week, he’s just shaking a bit to hold the bar overhead but other than a brief shout the lift didn’t look that hard to the causal viewer. I mean, hell, here’s superheavyweight Hossein Rezazadeh setting a world record.

He doesn’t make an ounce of noise, he takes a few breaths and no aspect of that lift looks even remotely difficult to the average viewer.   Again, folks who know the lifts know the difference; the average person does not understand what went into that. Contrast that to guys falling down in exhaustion after a track running event, marathoners crawling across the line, even cyclists with signs of pain on their face as they crest the hill, even shotputtters grunt like hell.  Ol’ing has none of that.

Americans come from psycho Puritan stock, remember; if you’re not working hard, you’re immoral. And the OL’s lack this for the most part since most of the real work happens in training.  The competitions look too easy because the lifts either go (and don’t look that hard) or don’t.  You don’t even get to see a lifter trying to save a lift most of the time; if it’s gone it’s gone. And Americans lose their erection because sports is supposed to be about pain and suffering and working hard.  And the OL’s don’t look that way to us.

The Lifters
This is not facilitated by the look of the lifters.  Remember, this was the issue in the 60′s and it’s just as much of an issue now when Americans couldn’t understand why a bunch of unmuscled guys were beating them.  OL’ers often move amazing weights without looking particularly muscular (only the recent Chinese have changed this).  Or at the very least they don’t have muscles in the places we care about (delts and arms).  Or they look downright chubby like Rezazadeh up there.  If Americans want to see fat people huffing and puffing and lifting stuff, we can just go to Walmart the day after Thanksgiving.

Ol’ers get perpetually frustrated by the idea that “Olympic lifters are all fat”.  But since we only like to see the biggest weights lifted (remember, bigger is better than smaller), we tend to only see the big fat boys in the super heavy weight class (and at the risk of being really shitty, Cheryl Hayworth did NOTHING to help the women’s end of the sport; this just a statement of fact). 

As well, Americans have some really strong beliefs about what someone who ‘lifts weights’ should look like and Ol’ers have not fit the bill since the sport changed.  Compare and contrast Arnold, Matt Croc, Mariusz Pudzianowski and Pyrros Dimas (who was relatively jacked for his day).

One of these things is not like the other

I think the average viewer finds it hard to take Ol’ers seriously when that dude down at the gym is way more jacked or at least has bigger guns. And he just does curls 5 days per week and takes creatine. Remember why American lifters were drawn to the sport in the heyday of the press: pressers had jacked delts and arms.  It’s only recently that the Chinese OL’er have made getting jacked a national pasttime but even they achieve that through general bodybuilding work because the Ol’s are not the best way to achieve this goal.  It might have an impact down the road.  Well, if anybody saw it.

Summary
So the entire sport is simply screwed from an American standpoint.  It’s too nuanced, a bunch of unmuscled guys doing ballet with a barbell (and the weights are too small to take seriously) in this oddly structured competition where nothing interesting happens, nobody can get the rules and you don’t find out who wins until the end. 

The sport doesn’t even lend itself to highlight reels like cycling (where you can show the climbs, the finishes and the crashes) because all the lifts look the same, and they don’t even look that hard and nobody is suffering.  The guy who won doesn’t seem to have done anything that the other guys didn’t do, he just did it with 1kg more on the bar.

Which is why the argument that putting it on TV is flawed completely.  You could put it on and folks might watch out of interest for a few minutes before changing the channel.  The sport is simply all wrong for the non-nuanced American mind (and all of the above means that lifters will never care about the sport either) and they wouldn’t watch it anymore than they would watch French art films or eat gourmet food if it were made available.      Which is why it’s not shown in a capitalist country, if nobody watches (because they don’t care), TV stations wont show it because they aren’t in the business to lose money by showing stuff nobody will watch.

The Prefontaine Counterargument
Now, my friend, bless his naive optimism, counterargues all of the above with the argument that “Americans didn’t care about running until they put Prefontaine on”.    But his argument still misses a lot of points, again why I spent so much time on seemingly irrelevant crap.  Because he is working from the operating assumption that Americans became fascinated in running simply because it was put on TV and I think that’s incorrect because the situations aren’t comparable.

First off, running is a sport Americans get.  It’s a bunch of guys racing head to head, everybody knows what running is, it’s an activity everyone has done at some point; hell, it’s part of our evolutionary past.  The guys suffer, the structure of the racing makes sense.  It’s a sport that we get conceptually and will watch at least for limited periods of time.

When Pre started to come to dominance, the running boom/fad in this country was just starting as folks were starting to become aware of and be concerned with things like cardiovascular and heart health and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and running fed into their desire for a quick fix.  Here I have trouble separating chicken and egg. Did Pre help kick off the running boom or did the running boom help people care about Pre?  I don’t know and I’m not researching it.  I’ll just say they complimented one another and move on.

But far more important than that was Pre himself.  Like Arnold and bodybuilding and Lance in the future, Pre was another guy who was the right kind of hero for American to get behind.  A kid from a broken home, ran on sheer guts, called the Europeans chickenshits for not front running.  As well, his fame first developed in Oregon under Bowerman and by the time he was making national news, the groundswell had already taken hold. 

And America loves fads and following what everyone else tells them is good; it’s how our best sellers work and it’s called social proof (the masses want to like what everyone else likes).  When folks started showing up with Pre t-shirts at races, that helped feed the interest.  

Pre just happened to be a runner, happened to be in a sport we got and happened to have the right backstory at the right time to grab America by the balls and make it care about running (we also had Shorter winning Olympic gold in 1972 which didn’t hurt).  If he’d done some sport we didn’t get, I bet he wouldn’t have made an ounce of difference.

That is, it wasn’t just because running was put on TV.  That wouldn’t have accomplished anything without it being the right kind of sport and having the right kind of hero to make people care.   But there is another issue, one that will sound like me being shitty but again this is just me making a statement of fact.

We Still Need a Hero
Pre won.   Actually, he more than won, in the US he was absolutely dominant even if he didn’t have quite the success overseas (but he gave it his all even to come 4th and was happy to slag his competitors as chickenshits).  He was the right guy in the right sport at the right time and that was  big part of it.

But most importantly he was destroying his opponents (like Arnold, like Lance).  Because Americans don’t give a shit about second place.  Or fourth place.  Or 10th place.  Which is where US lifters have been for decades.  The US hasn’t had heroes in OL’ing for 4 decades and that alone is a problem because it gives nobody for up and coming lifters to look up to.  They existed during our short heyday, now we have nobody.  Case in point: Americans went batshit when Phil Fister won World’s Strongest Man because finally an American was at the top of the sport.  We don’t have that in Ol’ing and if history is any indication, aren’t going to any time soon.

Which is why just ‘Putting Olympic lifting on TV’ wouldn’t do much.  Not only is the sport all wrong for the American mind, there are two other intractable issues for Ol’ing to overcome.  First is that it has to produce a winner (and that leads into my final discussion of our current lifters tomorrow).  And even if someone won, I’d argue that the lifter would have to have the right personality and backstory to get America to notice.  And I’m not sure Ol’ing lends itself to that.  I’m still not sure it would matter because even with the right guy, the right champion the sport is still just all wrong for our viewership.

But to have any chance of getting numbers into the sport would require making this country, both lifters and sportspeople alike care about the sport.  I see that as the fundamental problem with OL’ing, the reason that we ‘suck’.  Everything else contributes but they are more symptoms than causes.  We simply don’t care about the sport and that leads to all of the other problems, the numbers and everything associated with a sport nobody cares about.  And had I been writing this two years ago, I would have said that we’re never going to.

But something has changed, this is the first topic I’ve been explicitly avoiding for the last two days, it’s one that almost hurts me to write about but I will try to retain objectivity and keep my opinions to myself.  Because in the last couple of years, much of what I wrote above has started to change.  People have started to care about Olympic lifting, or at least some people, a groundswell has been building with vastly increased (at least relatively) numbers of facilities and equipment and coaching and interest.  That brings me to the final topic for today.

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Will Crossfit Save Olympic Lifting?

Yes, I did just write those words.  Because while USA Weightlifting has traditionally had about 2000 total lifters for most of it’s history, that number has apparently swelled to about 7000 in the last couple of years.  Suddenly there are all these new registered lifters and, factually, they are coming from the cult of Crossfit.

Because through their ‘programming’, Crossfit has managed to convince a bunch of upper middle class white 20 somethings that the Ol’s can help them reach their goals of ‘increasing work capacity across broad and modal time domains’ or whatever silly shit is on the website.  Facilities are springing up all over the place and they are getting bars and bumpers and squat stands.   I routinely tell people to find their local Crossfit compound if they want to find a place to Ol.

And suddenly the OL’s are the in thing to do even if folks are doing them for sets of 20 before sprinting and shotputting their child or whatever Rhonda is.  The coaching is even improving to some degree as Crossfit has had the sense to bring in people who know what they are doing like Greg Everett, Mike Burgener, even a local Austin ex-world class female lifter (Ursula who’s last name I do not know) to teach the certifications.

Certainly more is wrong with the Crossfit approach to the Ol’s than is right.  Their programming sucks, the lifts shouldn’t be done to the point of failure or rahbdoymolysis, a lot of what they do is flatly wrong from the standpoint of the lifts.  But that’s kind of secondary and can be fixed. 

Because in the same way that Hoffman brought basic barbell training to the masses, Crossfit has managed to do something that USA Weightlifting failed to do for 40 years: bring Olympic lifting to the masses.  Or at least more masses than it had before.  Love Crossfit or hate it, it has accomplished something the federation and lifters never could.

Already, there has been some impact, as I mentioned the number of registered lifters has gone up and I imagine there are more folks showing up at competitions because of this.  The interest is increasing and I know several OL’ing coaches who have picked up new athletes out of Crossfit.   It’s usually guys who realize that they are doing something wrong or want proper coaching or to compete in a real sport (NOT the Crossfit games) and know that they need an actual coach.  Of course, given the age issue, you’re not finding the next US OL’ing champion from a bunch of bored 20 and 30 somethings who get drawn into Crossfit.   They are too old for this crap.

But what may happen is that the adults now doing Crossfit will get their kids involved.  There is a Crossfit kids movement and the reality is that this might be sufficient to get more folks coming into the sport and starting young enough to maybe have a chance of producing down the road.  Adults who are interested in the OL’s may get their kids interested.  That’s how you grow a sport.

But that is a solid decade in the future as the folks doing Crossfit now indoctrinate their kids and we see if it has an impact when they get older.  It’s progress, it’s something, it’ll be interesting to see what develops.  But currently all we have is our resident elites.  Which is what I’ll look at tomorrow in the FINAL part of this stupidity.

 Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 10.

The sport had changed due to a rules change along with the dropping of the press (in 1974) and Americans, still fascinated with maximum strength and muscle size hadn’t changed.  Other changes in the gym culture of the day, the rise of bodybuilding, machine training and other strength sports (powerlifting, strongman) along with the big three starting to throw stupid money at its athletes just further diluted any talent that might have pursued OL’ing.

The sport, never more than a niche to begin with had begun it’s downward spiral.  What facilities existed started to disappear as the sport declined, incoming lifters went into other activities, the teachings (such as they were) of coaching and technique were lost, results declined, further decreasing interest.  The magazines didn’t cover the sport, nobody cared.  

And that’s led us to where we are today and, in essence, this part of the series is sort of the ‘punchline’ to all of this (the part that everybody wish I’d started with) although I won’t stop here because I want to address not only some recent developments but other things that might change the situation (if it’s changeable at all).  And while some of what I’m going to write will probably have been ‘obvious’ to everyone from the start, hopefully you’ll see that not all of it.  And why I spent 5 weeks getting to this point.

And as I continue today, this is where the simpletons who stopped after Part 1 of this series will say “See, this is all Lyle had to say.”  But they’ll be wrong.  These are the simple answers to the problem of Ol’ing, the ones everybody focuses on while ignoring what I think are bigger issues.  Even the mere existence of people that thing that there is a single, simple problem or fix makes part of my point.

For structural reasons, I’m going to actually address some of the problems along with some of the potential ‘fixes’ that have been suggested as I go.  It’s a bit more broken up but saves me a lot of tedious repetition by first defining the problems and then redefining them to address the solutions.  Hopefully it will all make sense.

And as you continue, some well-informed readers may note that I’m explicitly leaving out about three important things, very recent changes in the landscape of OL’ing that may or may not end up having a rather large impact.  I’ll get to those when the time is right but please be patient (if you’ve read this far, you’re patient by definition).

Much of what I’m going to say initially isn’t even news.  Quite in fact, as you’ll see in my sources, about 18 years ago in the early issues of Milo, a discussion of the state of US Ol’ing brought up pretty much exactly the same points.  And nothing has really changed in that time until very very recently (and I’ll talk about that change tomorrow or Friday). 

Deciding where to start in describing the current state of Olympic lifting isn’t easy since I see the problem as one vast interconnected web; there is no singular problem that can be readily identified in my mind.  So with no real reason other than it jumped to mind, I’ll start with the easy one and then just run in circles for a bit. 

If you get nothing else out of what follows, it should be this: there is no SINGLE SIMPLE problem with Ol’ing in this country (a mistaken inference that people continue to make with this series).  Because, fundamentally, everything is wrong with it.  I’d note that, as appropriate I’ll tie the issues here in with other parts of this series, mainly to justify having dragged everybody through them to get here.  

And mainly I’m going to focus on how the sport has existed historically in this country; I’ll address a few new developments towards the end of the final wrap-up.  So don’t freak if two specific names and one specific group go unmentioned for a bit.  What’s happened in the last couple of years is too new to have had an impact…yet.

In any case, let’s start with an easy one.

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A Lack of Facilities

Frankly, finding an OL’ing facility in the US, or even one where you can do the OL’s is like finding a virgin at a Catholic girl’s school; they exist but you gotta dig to find ‘em.  There have always been a handful of long-standing gyms with coaches who have consistently developed US lifters.  Places like Coffee’s Gym (he consistently produced top women lifters), Calpains, The Sports Palace and others, you can find a list at OWOW.   If you’re in the Austin area, get in touch with Grassiron to get hands-on coaching.

But in most cities, finding a place to do the OL’s has been traditionally impossible.  Commercial gyms have bent bars that don’t spin, bumpers are impossible to find and you get looked at funny or kicked out for dropping the bar from overhead.  Most followers of the sport either luck into finding a gym with OL’ing facilities (such as Grassiron Gym here in Austin) or get their own equipment and lift in their garage. 

Mind you, that didn’t really stop folks in other sports such as speedskating, where the insanely limited facilities didn’t hold us back.  Then again, all of the skaters came from that singular Midwestern area so they were already local to places to skate.  It was only people not from Minnesota/Wisconsin that were out of luck.  But that’s the situation in OL’ing, if you’re not lucky enough to live in a handful of places where OL’ing facilities exist (or can relocate to chase the dream), you’re not getting into the sport unless you break down and buy your own equipment.

Proposed Solution: Build More Facilities
A simple problem with a seemingly simple answer: don’t have facilities, just build ‘em and watch the sport grow, right?  While this seems logical on the surface it is based on a faulty assumption which is that people care.  And the reality is that the majority don’t know what Olympic lifting is, aren’t interested in Olympic lifting, and aren’t going to be interested in Olympic lifting any time soon (a topic I’ll come back to throughout the rest of this).

Spending a ton of money to build specialty facilities for a niche sport with few participants is just a losing proposition on all levels.  First, who is going to pay for it?  Second, who is going to use it?   You see this occurrence in spades at the Olympics, folks spend millions building these amazing facilities for the niche sports that require them which, after the games, go completely unused.  Because once the games are over, nobody cares any more. 

Sydney has plenty of unused stuff from their games and SLC is only lucky enough to have become the OTC for many winter sports to put the Oval and bobsled/luge track to use. Otherwise it would go unused, just an expensive leftover from a games steeped in controversy, corruption and graft.

Which isn’t to say that an OL’ing facility need be particularly expensive.  Platforms, bumpers, plates, squat stands.  It’s pretty simple stuff.  But from a commercial standpoint, the whole idea is completely flawed.  Because basing a business model around a sport that nobody does is not the way one succeeds in a capitalist society especially in a sport like OL’ing where the athletes are all broke (see below). 

Targeting niches only works if the niche has cash (and yes I will come back to specific group that I’m explicitly avoiding for the time being) which is why golf succeeds.  But OL’ing is not golf.   Poor athletes are poor and the guys who get into the activity who have money can just as easily outfit their garage as join a gym.

Make no mistake, it’s been tried; hardheads love to prattle on about the hardcore gyms they belong to that is nothing but old school dungeon equipment.  And you get to also hear about the roughly 22 members who use the place (while the typical commercial gym has 10,000 paying members of whom 300 use the place regularly). 

Small hardcore gyms are awesome, make no mistake, I love ‘em and would prefer not to train (or train anybody) anywhere else.  But they are always more expensive, usually falling apart (because the membership is lower and they can’t afford to fix stuff) and never attract more than the small niche who can’t stand Planet Fitness (I’d point you to the documentary Dodgeball for a look at Globogym vs. Average Joe’s Gym). 

And given the choice, the majority of folks will join the commercial gym for $20 per month so they can train for 3 days on the shiny equipment before never showing up again rather than pay $45 per month to train on equipment that’s falling apart for 3 days and never showing up again.  And keep in mind that it’s the majority who defines who wins the capitalism game under most circumstances. And the majority has spoken: big commercial gyms win, small hardcore gyms do not.

About the only way to make a hardcore oriented gym (or training studio) work is to cover more than that one niche base.  You can give the OL’ers a place to train but you have to recognize that your money comes from the general training client, or other sports training, or the general public (again, still avoiding a specific group for the time being).

And unless you have a shitload of money, you can’t compete with the big commercial gyms anyhow on space, equipment or price.  If you try to focus on just the niche, you fail economically and nothing is changing that.  The awesome hardcore gym I trained at in SLC was owned by a guy who ran another business that was lucrative.  The 30 members at the gym couldn’t even cover the electric bill.  But it was sure awesome to train there.

Because this isn’t like track cycling in the UK, where there was interest in the sport already and they were willing to put money into building a velodrome (that could also host World Cup events and make money).  OL’ing is too small a sport in the US to support more than a handful of dedicated facilities and there aren’t enough lifters to make putting on competitions financially feasible or beneficial.  This isn’t like running where 10,000 show up to run a 10k; it’s more like you get 50 lifters and maybe take the judges out to lunch if you’re generous.

And overseas Olympic lifters have plenty of places to train and compete; they don’t need the US.  Building an  OL-centric facility in this country is a losing proposition all around unless you accept a lot of non-OL specific trainees (general public, whatever) to keep the doors open.

And with this comes with a very related problem.

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A Lack of Qualified Coaches

Just as facilities for Ol’ing are nearly impossible to find in this country, so is competent coaching.  Usually you find the two going hand in hand, the handful of coaches with any understanding of the lifts or how to teach them are found in the handful of gyms. 

Jim Schmitz, Arthur Dreschler, Gayle Hatch, John Coffee and others are the handful of coaches in this sport, usually doing it for the love of the sport itself at the facilities that they are involved with.   Glenn Pendlay told me in email that we currently have two paid coaches in the US, China has 3000.  That’s coaches.  Paid coaches who do nothing but try to develop OL’ing talent.

And this is a problem given the insane technical demands of the sport.  They are grossly misconceptualized by most people who see them (Commonly heard question “Don’t their arms get tired?”) or simply taught incorrectly under most circumstances.  And in a sport where technique is just a monstrous part of overall success, having good coaching (and not picking up awful habits which take forever to correct) from the start is paramount.   And we just don’t have the people teaching things properly.

Again, here OL’ing is like speedskating where there were never more than a handful of coaches, with varying competency (even Dianne Holum, Eric Heiden’s coach, never really produced anybody but Eric, and he was just a freak).  Somehow what didn’t hold speedskating back is part of what’s hold Ol’ing back: there is simply a lack of good coaching.  Swimming had tons of coaches and coaching cycling is pretty much telling guys to “Ride lots.”

And I have no idea if most current coaches, (and again don’t freak out that I haven’t mentioned two specific people here yet) are up to date on Ol’ing technique or training on any level.  I imagine it’s no different than in every other aspect of American sport, there are some top notch folks, some mediocre guys and a ton of folks that are just making shit up as they go along (like arguing for a straight line pull in the OL’s).

Proposed Solution: Train More Coaches
Again another duhh solution and certainly USA Weightlifting offers it’s coaching certifications.  Which has had about as much impact on the level of coaching as most certification in this country.  It exists and it lets you put some nifty letters after your name but I’m not sure it accomplishes much more than that. Mind you, I took the club coach course years ago, I’m told it’s been revamped in recent years, I don’t really know enough about it to comment to any significant degree on it’s current iteration.

But this is a place where the US’s decentralized ‘system’ and lack of overarching organization is biting us in the ass: anybody who wants to call themselves an OL’ing coach and start coaching can do it, even if he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to the lifts or how to teach them.  In the Eastern European countries, coaches were highly trained on both general training theory and specific sports training theory and technique.  They pour energy into Olympic lifting coaching and training the way Americans pour gas into SUV’s.  And we do not.

But even there, the above assumes that coaches would have someone to coach.  Because, for the same reason that building facilities would be pointless, having lots of trained coaches available wouldn’t make an iota of difference because they’d be coaching thin air.  Because, among other things missing in the sport of OL’ing in this country is athletes.  And while some other sports have gotten away with relatively small athlete populations (for reasons I’ll address below), it hasn’t cut the mustard in Ol’ing.

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A Lack of Lifters: Introduction

For the past 30-40 years, USA Weightlifting has had something like 2000 total registered lifters or so including juniors and masters.  Compare that to the 450,000 that the Soviet Union had at it’s peak.  Contrast that to the 3,000 paid COACHES that Glenn Pendlay informs me exist in China.  They have more OL’ing coaches than the US has lifters.  Mull on that for a few seconds.

And most of the lifters we have, again, are juniors or masters.  And that latter group aren’t making the medal stand.  Something that the sport massively needs is an infusion of bodies to get into the sport.  You need enough people going into the sport to find a world beater.   Although, mind you, there are exceptions, I’ve talked about two (cycling and speed skating) for the most part generating top athletes requires numbers.

And those numbers don’t exist in Olympic weightlifting for a variety of reasons.  Some of it is that potentially great power athletes are drawn into the big three and track and field.  But that’s not true of everyone, just as it has been throughout the history of the iron game, there have always been folks taking up weight training purely for it’s own sake (or perhaps got into it secondarily through sports and then decided to skip the sports bit).  And those groups have traditionally been teenaged males and somewhat older adults.

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Teens or Adults: The Goal is Always the Same
Honestly, both groups, teenagers or adult 20-30 somethings (and again here I’m focusing exclusively on males) tend to get into weight lifting for the same basic reasons: to get jacked, buff, look better naked or hopefully attract the opposite sex.  Usually all of those.  It’s not until folks hit middle age that exercise for ‘health’ becomes a relevant goal to most people.  It’s all about appearance for the grand majority who join a gym.

It’s not even as if most are pursuing the iron game from a competitive standpoint.  And even if they did want to compete, powerlifting and bodybuilding are much easier to pursue, get into, and get reinforcement from than Ol’ing ever will be.  Why spend a year training the OL’s so that you can go lose to a 15 year old when you can just buy a bench shirt and add 100 lbs to your max?

But that’s still ignoring the fact that most don’t go into the weight room with any goal of competing.  Here’s some trivia for the day: most steroid use among weight trainers is by folks who never intend to compete.  They take drugs simply to get stronger and/or more jacked.  It’s purely for appearance and is the same reason that plastic surgery among males is on the rise (see: pec implants, ab contouring, calf implants and butt implants). 

And in the post-rise of bodybuilding, rise of the machines, rise of the commercial gym culture, the Ol’s simply don’t fit in with those goals (ok, fine, complexes got popular for fat loss for a while).   The Ol’s don’t really accomplish those goals well anyway.   Until you’re good at them, the Ol’s aren’t good for building strength, any muscle they build tends to be in pretty specific (and uninteresting to American lifters) muscle groups and, simply, there are faster and easier ways to accomplish either goal.  The Ol’s are too hard to learn and too hard to do compared to exercises that give more immediate results.

This certainly isn’t eased by the lack of facilities or coaching but, even if they existed, most wouldn’t care.    Hell, most aren’t even aware of the sport unless it happens to be an Olympic year and they accidentally turn on coverage during the 37 seconds that Ol’ing is being featured.  

The only magazines that talk about OL’ing are niche publications read only by the lifters themselves.  Even PLUSA can be found on the newsstands sometimes (though Greg Everson briefly published his Strength and Power magazine which covered them but it died quickly for a lack of interest and titties).  Mention Ol’ing as a sport to most people and all you get is a blank stare most of the time (before they ask you how much you bench).

Because about the only time the average gym trainee will even be remotely exposed to anything related to the Olympic lifts is when it’s time (about one or twice a year) for the mags to run a ‘Why You Should Be Doing Power Cleans’ article or features some athlete on the cover who says they are part of his routine and folks figure that doing them will make them awesome like that athlete.  So Men’s Fitness or whatever will run an article and show an athlete performing some abomination of a power clean, describing the movement in a way that makes anybody who knows the lifts die a little bit inside.

And then for about a month, every commercial gym is infested with guys doing horrible, horrible looking cleans with inadequate equipment until the next super secret exercise for freaky mass and fat loss shows up next month.  The Ol’s don’t make you big and they don’t make you strong until you’re good enough at them to use some decent weight.  Why bother with these stupid ass things you can load 8 plates per side on the leg press and take creatine?

Of course, there are exceptions, as the numbers of lifters clearly attest to.  Where do they come from?

OL’ing for the Upwardly Mobile White Guy
So who are the adults that get into the sport of Olympic lifting at either a competitive or non-competitive level?  Often they are ex-athletes, who learned the lifts as part of training for their sport who then moved on from football or basketball and decided to devote themselves to lifting.  They often have the general physiological propensities for the sport but are either starting late or having to unlearn a lot of bad habits (see my comments below).

Usually it’s adult males, perhaps they pursued bodybuffing or powerlifting earlier in life and got fed up with its inherent silliness.  They may have started delving into the history of the sport, gotten into the old school cellar dweller movement as a reaction to the silliness of the mainstream gym world, whatever.  Usually they are a bit older (mid to late 20′s or late 30′s, past the time when there is the monstrous drive for BIG GUNS TO GET CHICKS although, let’s be honest fellas, it never goes away) and get interested in this other activity.

They often come from that same middle class white stock that fuels cycling, swimming and speed skating and I had to think long and hard to understand why the latter three sports succeed and OL’ing does not given that commonality.  And the best explanation I can come up with is simply one of age with kids in swimming and speed skating invariably starting pretty young.  Which is crucial given the technical and feel demands of those sports. 

And while one might argue that the lack of coaching (it’s abundant in swimming) might hold skaters back, the fact is that even if you’re doing some stuff wrong, if you do it for 20 years, you get pretty good at it.  And speed skating is weird enough to let some folks get away with stuff at the highest level (Chad Hedrick was certainly not the prettiest skater) so long as you’ve got a motor, ice feel and corners.

Cyclists often start a bit later but the sport is notoriously non-technical (tactics are another story).  The learning curve for cycling is about 10 minutes or so and the training comes down to ‘ride lots’ because it’s low impact and your joints don’t fall off when you start drilling 400-500 mile weeks. 

If you have the genetic propensity (VO2 max for example is massively genetic and many are born with a higher Vo2 max than others will ever achieve with training), you can start seeing pretty early success in the sport.  It’s not unheard of for cyclists to start approaching the highest level in a few years of consistent training if the talent and drive is there.

But that doesn’t apply to adults entering Olympic lifting.  Assuming no bad habits to break, the technical demands of Ol’ing are just as high as swimming or speed skating (another reason I wanted to discuss both).  Learning basic technique may not take long but the nuances and mastery (especially in the snatch) may take a decade. 

And strength/power sports have that age cutoff since peak strength/power is around the mid-20′s.   Even a sport like cycling is more forgiving since endurance guys often peak later in their 20′s or early 30′s.  A guy starting cycling at 18 or even 20 still has 10+ years to fully develop.

But from the standpoint of high level Ol’ing competition, if you haven’t gotten under the bar by the time you’re 15 or so, you’re not going to make anywhere close to the top 99% of the time.  By the time you’ve put in your 10 years, you’re far past your peak of power production.   Even if you start at 15, you’re still going to be facing kids who started when they were 5 and have twice as long as you do under the bar.  That’s an insurmountable disadvantage.

That’s on top of greater difficulty developing the needed mobility and flexibility, feel and fearlessness to do the Ol’s when you’re starting older.  It’s the same reason it’s hard to learn gymnastics as an adult: your adult brain rebels against throwing yourself into the air upside down.  Kids bounce and don’t have that fear response, they learn backflips as kids and it’s no big deal when they are teens.  The same applies to Ol’ing and many adults simply won’t commit to the lifts because of that fear response.

Which brings me full circle to talk about kids and lifting.  Because, as it has always been, teenagers (or even pre-teens sometimes) often get into lifting for various reasons.  And, given the demands of the sport, the age issue and the time under the bar issue, they are what’s required to find potential US champions.  The sport needs lots of kids entering the sport.

I Believe That Children are the Future
Realistically, the sports needs kids starting young to have any chance of getting the time under the bar that they need to master the lifts.  But kids don’t usually join commercial gyms and are only exposed to whatever sports they get access to in school.  And outside of a handful of programs (at least one high school in SLC had a small OL program that took kids to competition), OL’ing as a sport simply doesn’t exist at the high-school or collegiate level outside of individuals who may pursue it for their own reasons. 

About the only time athletes at those levels are exposed to the OL’s is in training for another sport like football.   And there the coaches are typically incompetent, teaching a bastardized powerclean that is more of a power reverse curl.   This is what cleans look like most of the time in this group because the goal is just about moving the most weight (you see the most amusing rationalizations for downright shitty technique from strength coaches who are simply too lazy to learn how to teach the movements properly).

This isn’t universal, sometimes you get someone who can coach the lifts and takes the time to do so but that’s like finding a virgin in the senior class of a Catholic girl’s school: it’s more of a Platonic theoretical construct than reality.   And from a recruiting standpoint, even if you could take some of the high-school kids who were ‘taught’ the lifts and convert them to the Olympic lifts (which would make them start caring in the first place) they’d have so many bad habits that you had to fix that it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.

The same holds more or less at the collegiate level, many strength programs use the Olympic lifts, some teach them competently  but most do not.  And, as I said above, there are some athletes who come out of collegiate athletics to pursue Olympic lifting.  But if they graduate at age 23, that gives them all of 1-2 years before they’re past their peak.  It’s just not enough to break their bad habits and allow them to master the movements.

Mind you, this goes to the idea of development and having one in place.  I’m really not in a place to comment heavily on the USA Weightlifting federation or what it is or isn’t doing.  The impression I get is that it’s doing very little for the developmental end of the sport.  But that’s just reality, you can’t develop what there isn’t to develop in the first place. 

You could have the facilities and train the coaches and have the development program and all for what?  To train the immense numbers of absolutely NOBODY who shows up.  Because they are busy doing other more interesting stuff like trying to get big guns and bench the world to impress girls/their buddies.

Because this isn’t like a niche sport like cycling where development was relevant because there were athletes involved in the sport who had the potential to get good (at least at the Olympic or national level).  The kids pursuing cycling weren’t being pulled into other more interesting activities the way that teenaged kids in the weight room are being pulled towards bodybuilding or powerlifting or what have you.

Exceptions That Prove the Rule
It’s worth mentioning exceptions to the above which sort of makes the point: some of the US’s top lifters did start young due to some odd circumstance or another.  Casey Burgener comes to mind; his father Mike has been teaching Olympic lifting since before Dan John was born (read: since the dawn of recorded time) and Casey was brought up in the sport and trained properly from a young age because of it (this is not unlike many speedskaters, swimmers or cyclists whose parents had been involved in the sport and passed down both any genetic propensities along with interest in, love for, and support for the sport).

Others like Wes Barnett got involved in the sport (I’m not entirely sure how he got involved) at a young age and put in 12 years under the bar. Wes would take 6th in the Olympics after 12 years of completely self-supported training.  He lamented in the pages of Milo that he had to work 40 hours/week to make a living and then work another 40 hours/week in the gym.  I’m actually going to wait to address our current lifters and some of the issues that they face until later (probably tomorrow or Friday) so it won’t interrupt the flow of what I’m on about right now.

But again, those are the exceptions and the handful of lifters who get into it young for various reasons don’t provide the numbers needed to find a world beater.  The reality is that most teens entering the weight room are either doing it to facilitate their pursuit of the big three/track and field or bodybuilding/powerlifting.  So how do you get more people into the sport in the first place? 

Proposed Solution #1: Recruit Athletes from Other Sports
This is one potential solution and has been tried to at least some degree with Shane Hamman as one of the most well known.  As a 1000+ lb squatting powerlifter, Hamman switched to Ol’ing after high school and actually made a fairly good showing, finishing 10th in 2000 and 7th in 2004 before retiring.  

There is still actually much debate as to the ability to powerlifters to make the transition, there’s been a long-held belief that excessive benching prevents them from ever achieving the mobility to truly master the overhead lifts but this may just be a leftover of some old ideas about training (some Olympic lifters in the modern era do bench pressing as a limited assistance movement for general upper body whatever though they usually do it in a fairly loose and explosive style).

Certainly there is potential here but keep in mind my previous comments about the role of limit strength and such in Olympic lifting: it’s relevant but clearly far from the whole picture (Hamman’s back squat is far in excess of anything that a top Olympic lifter would do and they still outlifted him).  Starting late, his technique was never going to get to where it needed to be before he hit that age 24-25 peak.  Again, this is a place where you’d need to start them young to have much of a chance.

But this isn’t like speedskating where what you do on the ice and what you do in inline are fundamentally similar on a lot of levels (technically and physiologically).  PL’ing and OL’ing are distinct sports, only sharing the squat (and PL’ers usually squat very differently than OL’ers) and with the deadlift looking kind of like start of the pull.   The speed of movement is totally different, the neural demands are totally different.

Even in other sports, trying to convert a great athlete at a later date often fails.  Consider Lance Armstrong’s marathon performance (he didn’t have the decade of running specific training to convert his aerobic motor to the movement) or even Jordan’s failed attempt at baseball.  Converting other athletes only works if they have a similar physiological background or they have some innate capacity to pick up the new activity quickly.  And that last bit is key for the OL’s if you’re not starting guys when they are 5.

One possibility that occurs to me here is gymnastics.  It’s a large sport (of predominantly middle- and upper class white folks) with a large enough junior and collegiate level for there to be lots of athletes.  But many can’t cut it past high school (they can go into cheerleading just like football players).  And they are invariably explosive as hell.  In this vein Kim Goss used to recruit female OL’ers from the ranks of gymnasts who had gotten too old for their sport. 

Mind you, female gymnasts are past their prime at age 14 and often looking for something new to do, you can convert them and get them 10 years under the bar by the time they are 23.  Male gymnasts usually don’t give up the dream until college when/if they can’t cut it. So the development period would be a lot shorter.

Gymnasts are already fearless, have amazing flexibility and typically have levers that are at least close to what might be ideal for OL’ing.  Perhaps more importantly they always have just amazing body awareness and proprioceptive skills.  If there is any group that might be able to pick up the nuances of OL’ing technique more quickly than average it might be this group simply because of their background in movement.   Anybody who has trained a gymnast knows that you can tell them ‘shift your weight back 1/4 inch’ and they will know exactly what you mean.  Get a gymnast out of high school and you might just turn them into a lifter before they peak out at 23-24 years of age. 

Of course, there is a final group, one that is tremendously underrepresented in the sport of OL’ing (dominated by pasty white Europeans), which America has in large number, a group that would appear to have a propensity towards speed, power and explosion.  A group from which several of Americas recent top finishers (i.e. Wes Barnett and Kendrick Farris) are members of.  That group is, of course, blacks of west African descent. 

I suspect that if there is potential for US Olympic Lifting to succeed, that success may reside here.  It’s unfortunate that neither Barnett or Farris were able to medal this is a place where a single winning athlete might have started a tradition in the sport, a tradition that has simply not existed to this point.  But I’m not sure how the sport would go about getting folks involved.  

The relative inexpensiveness of equipment would be one facilitating factor (you could outfit a basic facility relatively cheaply compared to some other sports). I am aware of at least one group Inner City Weightlifting that may be working towards this.  Perhaps like the Philadelphia swimming program, something might come out of this.  But OL’ing is competing here against the monstrous draw of the big three and track and field which have something that OL’ing hasn’t had since the 1950′s.

And that’s incentives which is right where I’ll pick it up tomorrow.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 9.

So having looked at the events that allowed us to be dominant (tho again some think that the US Golden Age is more a myth, just a function of the competition being lower which allowed the US to get away with what they were doing), let’s look at what was going from 1960 forwards.

Make no mistake that a lot was going on and I can’t possibly cover everything. I’d point folks to Bud Charniga’s 6 part series again for a truly comprehensive look at what was going on in the sport both in America and elsewhere, I’ll just try to hit some high points. And the following isn’t meant to be in any sort of order of importance (or even necessarily chronological order though I’ll try to sequence it right), this was all sort of developing at the same time.

A Rule Change in 1964: Thigh Brush Now Ok

Again I want to thank site reader Josh for contacting me to remind me about this, I was aware that this rule had changed but wasn’t sure when it was and didn’t realizes that it coincided quite so nicely with the US’s downturn in the sport. To understand this and why it had such an impact on the sport, I need to explain one of the technical rules of the sport which was this.

In the early days of the sport, one of the rules was that the bar couldn’t actually touch the legs. I don’t know why this rule was in place and it doesn’t matter but this was part of the sport. Among other consequences, this meant that the bar was held slightly in front of the body and, due to that physics thing again, it change the nature of the lifts considerably. First and foremost it slows down the lift since the lever arm relative to the axis of rotation is longer. Secondly, it ends up requiring more upper body strength to control the bar (since the bar is ‘swung out’ from the body).

Lifters often find out both the hard way when a heavy weight gets out in front of them, suddenly a lift that should be easy and quick becomes much slower and harder (as well the bar is put out front of the lifter making it more difficult to keep the bar path right for a proper catch). In modern lifting, keeping the bar close is a key part of technique for the grand majority of lifters.

In 1964, this rule was eliminated and the bar was allowed to brush/touch the thighs which basically reversed all of the above. The bar could be kept in closer, increasing movement speed. It also decreased the reliance on the upper body both for stabilization and pulling (you might have noted a lot of arm pulling in the video of early lifting I posted a few days back) and put the emphasis onto the legs and lower body for generating power. It would cause a major shift in the approach to OL’ing going forwards and was likely as much a key in this as anything else (especially given American fascination with a jacked upper body).

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The Rise of the Europeans

It was about this time that, having rebuilt from the war, that the Eastern Europeans were really able to put their effort into sport for their own political goals (as discussed back in 2007 when I started this series). Among other things they would start to throw resources and people at the sport but I already talked about that in a previous section. As well, they started really looking at the sport in terms of technique, optimization, and what was needed to succeed in the sport.

In terms of technique, the focus started to shift more towards speed, especially in how quickly lifters ‘switched’ from the pull to the squat under. Americans had always more or less muscled the weight up, focusing on pulling the weight high to get under it. Europeans started to focus on what is now known as speed-strength and the rapid switching.

So rather than take time trying to pull the bar up, they focused on just pulling the bar high enough and then getting down under it as quickly as they could. You can see this clearly in some of the videos I posted last week. These guys spend a heartbeat at extension (and many don’t even quite get there) before flying under the bar for the catch. And since it’s way easier to move your relatively lighter body down that it is to move a heavy bar UP…..

Mobility and flexibility were also emphasized since it allowed lifters to move more quickly without their own bodies getting in the way (mobility also allowed for the deep squat position to be hit more easily, and the deeper you can squat under, the lower you have to pull the bar; another benefit).

In terms of training, slow grinding movements were avoided for the most part (or at least used in a very limited degree) since it wasn’t found that those carried over to the more dynamic movements terribly well. This was demonstrated both empirically and in research (Charniga examines a lot of the research on the carryover from maximal and limit strength to speed strength in his articles sourced below) where various lines of research pointed away from high-tension, pseudo-isometric work and towards much more dynamic explosive work for optimizing the qualities required for OL’ing success.

I imagine that a big help in this regard is that the Eastern European countries were coming at the sport from a purely OL-centric standpoint. That is, recall that the US had come at the overhead/Ol’s from a background of physical culture, maximum strength and hypertrophy. That was what they knew, that was what they liked (because it appealed to the simple, appearance obsessed lifters), that was what they did.

Ol’ing for Americans was just part of the overall goal of being strong and jacked and this was reflected in the training of the top stars which was a mix of maximum strength, bodybuilding and some OL practice. Many Ol’ers would spend a good part of the year just bodybuilding or strength training and then jack in the OL’s when it was time to compete. But Ol’ing was just part of the overall package.

In contrast, the Europeans didn’t have that background since they weren’t coming out of a niche subculture for rich white people. They were looking to go to the top of the sporting world for political and ideological reasons and their focus on OL’ing was part of that. But for them, OL’ing was it’s own activity and they approached it from the standpoint. Basically they started with a fresh slate and built from there, developing training methods and philosophies that only served the purpose of improving the OL’s.

The goal wasn’t to get strong and jacked and then hope you’re OL performance went up; it was to optimize your OL’ing with everything else as a purely secondary goal. That was especially true for the snatch and clean and jerk but even in the press which was still contested, the Europeans were treating it more as a speed lift. Whether this was a cause or an effect of relaxed judging I can’t say (I’m sure Charniga addresses it). But they were approaching it from a speed of movement type of way.

I’d also note that some of their early research found an inverse relationship between pressing strength and the snatch; if you improved one the other got worse. Which was a good indication that maximum/limit strength and speed of movement were at odds with one another.

They also came at it from a far more centralized viewpoint due to the communist/socialist nature. The title of Charniga’s series “There is No System” is really referring to the fact that the American system of training didn’t exist. There was no central philosophy, no central idea; it was just as decentralized as everything else in the US. Lifters sort of did what they did, or did what they liked, or did what other lifters were doing and hoped it worked.

We just threw people at sports and let them work it out. And that got us pretty far in certain sports. Especially the ones where we had the sheer numbers (i.e. baskeball) that a lack of system didn’t matter at the end of a day (throw enough people into any system and someone will rise to the top). But Olympic lifting was a niche activity in the US without monstrous numbers, there was no system of training or coaching or anything.

And against countries that were investing massive resources and manpower specificaly towards that goal, it got us into trouble. That was on top of treating sport as a profession (while Americans were hamstrung by the amateur rules) and having their athletes train full time at levels that were heretofore unimagined. Training frequencies and volumes went up and the majority of it was dedicated to movements that enhanced the OL’s specifically. And, effectively, these countries were just mobilizing every resource they had into optimizing performance in this one sport (along with others) on top of focusing on winning at the Olympic level.

And as soon as it happened, their lifters started to jump ahead of the Americans, their results started to improve, they started to win medals and set record after record.

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The Fall of the USA

And this change in the climate of the sport was reflected as US lifters started to lose ground fairly rapidly though their results during this period indicate to some degree what we were doing wrong. Because while our results in the press stayed fairly high early on, our results in the quick lifts rapidly fell behind the European nations. It was obvious that the focus on maximum strength that had ‘worked’ to this point was no longer working except in the one lift that relied heavily on it.

And for reasons discussed at length (I’d say ad nauseum but I am in no position to criticize) by Charniga in his series, the US was resistant to accepting reality. They were working from the standpoint of what had ‘worked’ before and weren’t going to change. This was what I was referring to yesterday that American success would end up being part of their downfall: what they had done before had put them on top and they saw no fundamental reason to change their approach.

But there were other apparent factors such as good old fashioned inertia and the fact that coaches just tend to hand down what they personally did to their charges (see also: American football and how long it held onto outdated conditioning ideas). The guys who had been successful in the 50′s were coaching the new breed the same way that they always trained. They didn’t know any other way. And it’s not as if anybody really knew what the Europeans were doing, the information just wasn’t available.

But as big of an issue is the fact that Strength and Health was still the dominant magazine for disseminating information about training and the Olympic Lifts just as it had been for damn near 3 decades. And here the commercial interests of the magazine got dragged into it (this is where capitalism can go awry, when commercial interests are more important than the truth).

About this time, Hoffman was on a big push for his new isometric/power racks; he had done work with some athletes that just generated what seemed like amazing strength results and it was in his commercially best interest to keep pushing that. What was left out of the early reports on such amazing strength gains was the fact that they had also test run a new compound called Dianabol. Not recognizing the profound impact of the drug on gains (or preferring to downplay it because it wouldn’t sell racks), it’s impact was minimized or simply ignored.

Hoffman heavily pushed functional isometric training as the key to strength gains, in as little as a couple of minutes per day, pressing against the pins of the rack, you could get strength gains that he was certain would push American lifters back to the top (it didn’t hurt that he had a financial benefit to be gained by pushing this). And he pushed it heavily as the solution to our Olympic lifting woes because he was still working from the base idea that maximum strength was the key to performance.

That, coupled with American lifter’s focus and enjoyment of pure strength training kept OL’ers training the way that they always had: some bodybuilding work to get jacked, a focus on big strong muscles throw slow work, functional isometrics. Occasionally working on the OL’s and not understanding why they couldn’t keep up with the countries who were focusing solely on OL’ing as it’s own sport. And starting to train with progressively higher volumes and frequencies in very specific types of work (if I have space I’ll try to briefly discuss some of the primary training ‘schools’ before I finish).

Effectively the sport was changing, the Europeans were focusing on speed of movement and higher frequency work in the Ol’s to improve technique in the lifts while the US were doing what they had always done: training the Ol’s a few times per week and doing a ton of maximal strength or isometric work. Physiques were changing already, with a shift to a leaner lighter look (and the big boys were just chubby). And Americans, still confusing appearance with performance couldn’t understand it.

This is even reflected (as quoted extensively by Charniga) by writer’s in Strength and Health commenting that the guys dominating the OL’ing stage didn’t look muscled at all; to an American mind these guys certainly didn’t ‘look’ like lifting champions. And they seemed fixated on that rather than on the fact that these ‘unmuscled’ guys were setting record after record and handing them their ass. And didn’t make the connection between what they were doing that wasn’t working and what they had always done. Their guys were buff and strong as hell but they were getting ass kicked on the platform by guys who didn’t look the part.

They just chalked up European success to ‘working harder’ (see also: the Puritan work ethic that I talked about before) and certainly that was part of it. But it wasn’t even remotely all of it. The sport had changed and American lifting had not changed with it. But that wasn’t all that happened because 10 years later, a host of other stuff would occur that would continue to degrade the US’s previous performance and lead us to where we are today.

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The 70′s Were an Ugly Decade, An Ugly Ugly Decade

I’m no historian as I have proven throughout this series but I’m going to throw out a handful of different things that happened in the 1970′s that probably signalled the final death knell for Olympic lifting in this country.

At least one that probably deserves mentioning was the rapidly increasing stupidity in terms of payment for professional sports. Here I am truly no historian but it seems that about this time the incentives for playing the big three were starting to grow and grow (and I’d make a correction to an earlier part of this series: steroids were already prevalent in football in the 70′s, not the 80′s as I previously stated. Thanks, Glenn).

That alone would serve to dilute any potential talent away from Ol’ing, not that most interested in the team sports would have been pursuing OL’ing in the first place. But as the money got bigger, the incentive to really pursue one of the big three got bigger and bigger. Today, it’s just moronic the amount of money guys get paid to play a game.

And while there were certainly a ton of other things going on socioculturally (think the 60′s and flowerpower, the 70′s and Vietnam, etc), I really want to focus on three big things that were happening in the US specifically in terms of gym culture that I think drastically impacted on the sport of Olympic lifting in this country.

Because even in the 60′s, the US was still trying. Sure, it was trying with totally outmoded ideas of training, technique and the rest but it was trying and still hoping that it could return to its former glory. It was just failing and couldn’t come to terms with why. But going into the 70′s a number of things would occur that truly destroyed the sport in this country.

The Press is Dropped

As I mentioned previously, the press was always one of the big focus lifts for US Ol’ers for reasons I talked about yesterday. And to at least some degree it had been the press (along with being able to muscle the clean and jerk to some degreee, especially before the thigh brush rule change) that had put them ahead. Simply, you could give up a bunch of kilos in the snatch (a more technical precision lift that required a lot of practice; hence: something that Americans weren’t interested in) and just make it up in the clean/jerk and clean/press.

But in 1972 even that potential advantage would be lost. The Europeans had already reconceptualized the lift as a speed lift as I mentioned above although part of that had to do with some of the judging issues. They could make it a speed lift because judges were letting more shit slide in the lift. And as that problem kept getting worse and the press was becoming a standing bench press, the solution was to finally just drop the lift entirely. And suddenly one of the biggest advantages that US Olympic lifters had had in the first place was now gone.

And now the US lifters were totally screwed in competitions. They were still using outdated training and methods (spurred in part by what I talked about above) and now the only lift where it might have helped was gone. They had already slipped in the quick lifts and that slippage was just magnified when the remaining strength lift was removed.

But there was still more going on about that time that signalled the final death knell of the sport in this country in my opinion.

The Rise of The Terminator

The first was the final mainstreamization (is too a word) of bodybuilding, an action that can be attributed to two names: Joe Weider and his protegé Arnold (no last name needed). Weider was in the process of creating his empire, based around magazines, equipment and supplements. And Arnold was the perfect poster child. Joe took this unknown Austrian kid and helped to turn him into an absolute superstar.

As I mentioned yesterday, previously bodybuilding was looked askance on as a cult activity for self-obsessed narcissists (who were probably gay). It didn’t make sense for grown men to do nothing but get big muscles and then primp around in their bathing suits covered in baby oil. The majority wanted nothing to do with it. And Arnold made it ok. Or at least more ok than it had been.

He was clearly no poof, he kicked all kinds of ass in his movies (and the 80′s were a decade of massively muscled superhero action figures), he made the activity ok for the mainstream to be interested in. Americans were even willing to overlook the fact that he was from Foreignland ™. His personality and sheer force of will couldn’t be ignored.

Arnold would win his first Olympia in 1970 and make his first movie the horrible Hercules in New York in the same year. A couple more flops would follow before Pumping Iron produced in 1977 showed people that bodybuilding was more than just a bunch of weirdos in their bathing suits on stage; these guys were hardcore. And while the OL’s are fun and all, who wouldn’t rather get this out of their training?

Finally, in 1982, he would shoot to stardom due to Conan the Barbarian and his fame would just continue to increase. He became the face of the American action hero, another true to life (and bigger than life) action figure. He’d even be elected to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness in an attempt to stem the (then new) rise in childhood obesity.

Like Pre before him and Lance in the future, Arnold just had that same force of will character that made people pay attention. He succeeded at everything he put his mind to; I have no doubt he’d be elected president if he were allowed to run. Arnold took the American mind by it’s ears and made it listen to him talk about coming and coming and coming from bodybuilding training. And they listened. Along with this was a change in how people looked at training.

Previously, bodybuilding had been done in addition to maximum strength training and with the overhead lifts as part of the relatively non-specialized physical culture movement. Certainly some, bodybuilders of the 70′s and 80′s often did a clean and press but that would rapidly disappear as ‘modern training methods’ were developed that were focused solely on bodybuilding to the exclusion of anything resembling actual strength, power or ability. The insurgence of anabolic steroids into the sport, which allowed guys to train in a fairly silly fashion (compared to what had gone before) helped with this; why grind out sets of 5 with monster weights if you can just pump it up and take a pill and get jacked?

And the American lifter, which already had that ‘I want it all and I want it now’ mentality grabbed onto an activity which not only fed into their ‘form over function’ mentality but also their need for immediate gratification now that it was suddenly ok to do. The supplement industry, which had always existed, really came to the forefront thanks to Weider. Muscle gain and fat loss was as easy as buying the newest concoction and that’s a whole lot easier than training.

Competition was also changing for those that didn’t just train for personal or vanity reasons as along with this was the development of the IFBB under the hand of Joe Weider. Previously bodybuilding was run by the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) and bodybuilding had height classes; as well the clean and jerk was part of the score which forced guys to train it to one degree or another. Weider threw that out and the Olympic lifts, which had been part of gym culture for decades slowly started to slip out of the training of the day.

And seeing a marketing opportunity in all of this the magazines changed as well. Even Strength and Health had been downplaying it’s Ol’ing coverage. Hoffman stated that a mere 0.5% of the 200,000 readership he had were Ol’ers and he knew that the money was in the masses. OL’ing was on the way out and bodybuilding was on the way up.

Soon magazines like Muscle and Fitness and Flex would change the landscape of lifting ‘literature’. Whereas kids getting into the activity in the 40′s had seen images of big strong men lifting weights overhead, the focus shifted to getting huge, and jacked and buff by using the Weider methods and pumping it up from all the angles.

Much of which was spurred on by….

The Rise of the Machines

At about the same time Arnold was mainstreaming bodybuilding was the first major development in gym technology and that was the development of exercise machines, primarily Nautilus as developed by Arthur Jones. His first machine, the Nautilus Pullover would be sold in 1970 and the gyms, such as they existed, would never be the same. Jones was a consummate salesman, running ad after ad in magazines to sell his product.

He claimed results from miniscule amounts of training (compared to what the bodybuilders were doing) due to his focus on High Intensity Training. He had his own mouthpieces, bodybuilder Mike Mentzer being the most well known who claimed to get the same gains in muscle mass from short intense workouts as the others were getting from their hours in the gym.

This happened along with the development of the first commercial gym chains such as World Gym and Gold’s Gym, both started in California (where, honestly, most of this was really going on). Previously, when gyms existed they were dank dungeons populated by cellar dwellers (a term still used by old school purists) and filled with the most basic of equipment. Basic barbell training was all that was done for the most part.

But with the development of the mainstream commercial gym (because the money is ALWAYS in the majority) and the rise of machine training, coupled with the new focus on bodybuilding as a totally separate identity, gyms started to change. People wanted fancy machines and America is all about style over substance.

Barbells and chalk and noise and grunting scares away the masses which is where you make your money in a capitalist society, the quick lifts were dangerous and exposed owners to liability and made all that awful noise when the weights were dropped. Numerous companies would jump on this bandwagon producing endless lines of fancy, easy to use machines.

To get the most money means making training easy and simple and that meant doing away with the platforms and bumpers and filling your gym with machines where the hardest thing you do is pull a pin on the stack and then pump until you come. Even the remaining bars and racks and plates were unacceptable for the overhead lifts; it’s rare enough to find a bar that spins well in a typical commercial gym. Bumper plates? Forget about it.

The Rise of Powerlifting

And the final big factor that i think played a role was the formation of powerlifting as it’s own sport. Coming out of the odd lifts that I referenced yesterday, powerlifting started to develop as a competitive sport based around the squat, bench press and deadlift. And at the risk of irritating the powerlifters again let’s face facts: from a technical standpoint, the powerlifts aren’t even in the ballpark compared to the OL’s (that’s along with the powerlifts inherently lending themselves to what Americans like to do, get strong and jacked).

Because while you can learn the OL’s at a basic level in as short period of time, mastery takes years and years (it can take a decade to master the snatch, ahem). The PL’ing movements are trivial by comparison, you can be competent in a short period of time and have the movements more or less dealt with in no time at all (again, I realize that mastering current GEAR takes time but we’re talking about the 70′s when the cutting edge of gear was putting half tennis balls behind your knees).

They didn’t require specialized equipment (just a basic bar and the same plates every gym had) and America was already forming it’s unending bromance with the bench press as the key movement. Even gyms that were machine crazy could keep a squat rack and bench press in and guys could train for the powerlifts. They didn’t take much room, were relatively easy to learn and teach and most folks used a type of training that they always enjoyed which was slow, grunty strength. Comparatively speaking, the OL’s just had no real draw.

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And That Was That

And that all meant that in addition to everything else going on, the rise of the Eastern Europeans while the US stayed stagnant, what few people entering the weight game who might have pursued Olympic lifting were now going into other activities. Bodybuilding and powerlifting were both far easier to get into, there were more people, they fit into the type of training Americans liked and gave a much more immediate bang for the buck than Ol’ing ever could.

Gyms were changing towards a machine based approach as training methods got diluted by pure bodybuilding methodology and barbells and bumpers were considered old school (except to the niche) and were relegated to the corner of the gym if they were kept at all.

And the cycle was started, the number of lifters was diminishing, the ones that did exist couldn’t produce for a number of reasons, the facilities were disappearing and that sounded the death knell for the sport. Less facilities meant less lifters, less lifters meant less interest, less interest meant less coaches and knowledge development, less coaches and knowledge meant less lifters and less facilities and the spiral downward couldn’t be stopped.

Some also feel that the remaining lifters started to get into a psychological spiral of failure; their inability to produce at the highest levels caused them to start to decrease their expectations in competition. Basically, they simply gave up (in the same way that runners may be giving up when they see 10 Kenyans at the line).

Charniga points out that foreign lifters started to be disallowed from US competitions; basically helping American lifters do better. Amusingly, a similar trend appears to be occurring in American distance running with America-only events or American-only prize money. Since we can’t beat ‘em, we just won’t let ‘em compete. Like the World Series. I’ll talk about this more as I wrap this stupidity up in the next few days.

The sport, already niche to begin with became even more niche with a handful of enclaves in the country. Usually ex-lifters themselves who maintained the old teachings. All in the face of an American lifting community that simply no longer gave a fuck. It didn’t even matter that American sports fans didn’t care, they had never cared in the first place. But the lifters that had once gone into OL’ing, or at least been exposed to it, no longer were in the fact of bodybuilding, machines and powerlifting (strongman would show up later to further dilute any potential talent).

And, again, all of this was happening as the Europeans were continuing to throw endless athletes and resources and research into the sport. Powerlifting and bodybuilding weren’t state allowed sports and weren’t Olympic events, they didn’t have the big three sports pulling potential talent away for money. They were throwing thousands (or hundreds of thousands in the case of the USSR) of athletes at Olympic lifting just as the US was losing what few lifters it had had (and the ones left weren’t adapting to the changing sport).

Sources
There Is No System Parts 1-6 by Bud Charniga Again, I’d refer people to Bud Charniga’s article series on the decline of American Olympic lifting, very interesting are the bits about how American lifters just couldn’t understand why the lifters handing them their ass didn’t ‘look’ the part of why their old methods weren’t working anymore. His site sucks (it’s still in FRAMES, for god’s sake) but the information is excellent.
Farticles by Bud Charniga. I’d also point readers to articles 5-8 in this list which examine varying aspects of the OL’s along with the issue of maximum/limit strength and what role (if any) it plays in success in the lifts (Article 5 specifically addresses how the allowance of thigh brush significantly changed the nature of the lifts). And check out the URL if you’re wondering why I called it that.

And that’s where I’ll cut it today. Tomorrow I’ll look at where things stand now in the sport (almost finally answering the original question and the title of this series); if there’s space I’ll start to examine some of the ‘solutions’ that have been proposed to try and elevate the US back to a high level of importance. If not, that will wait until Thursday and Friday for the final wrap-up (I mean it).

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 8.

The big issue, however was one of timing with roughly 98% of our medals being won in this very narrow time frame between 1948 and 1960 and almost nothing since then (we have a handful of medals literally along with the two women’s medals in 2000). I finish by asking the question of what was going on during that time frame that allowed us to be so dominant along with wondering what in the hell happened.

Today I want to look at what might have been going on during that time period, in terms of the same factors that I’ve looked at in other parts of this series (and hopefully I won’t be too wordy about it) that led to the US’s dominance. Basically to see if anything about that time had similarities or differences to what I’ve babbled about for what seems like the last year and a half.

Sociocultural Rhetoric

As I mentioned previously, weight training was an ‘offshoot’ if you will of a developing physical culture movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. This included a focus on overall health, good living and a host of other factors including overall athleticism. It was a time of development, experimentation and there was a distinct lack of specialization among the followers of that concept.

And weightlifting, which was still a relatively recent activity, at least in any formal sense, was part of that. Mind you, it was part and parcel of it but things like gymnastics, hand balancing, muscle control and many other things were done as part of the overall movement.

It’s critical to realize that, especially given the time, this was not much more than a cult movement. This was just after the industrial revolution and folks were mainly excited to not have to work in a coal mine 27 hours per day to try to earn a living; diseases were starting to come to the forefront but the majority of people (just as today) weren’t interested in being what looked like cultish ascetics for health. Bring on the brandy and cigars please.

As well, sports hadn’t embraced weight training on any level as ideas about lifting weights slowing an athlete down or making him too muscle bound to perform still existed. The only folks lifting weights were doing it pretty much exclusively for the sake of lifting weights as part of the overall movement. And the goal was mostly about developing maximum strength and/or muscle size (athleticism was as often as not handled with other activities like gymnastics or tumbling) and the programming reflected that.

But guys such as Bernarr McFadden and Eugene Sandow would establish some of the earliest ideas for both weightlifting and bodybuilding that later folks such as John Grimek and others would build upon. Of course, given the capitalistic nature of the country, such folks tried to make a living and often did it through the publication of training manuals and courses, many of them can be downloaded (for those of a historical bent) at the Golden Age of Iron Men page. 

It’s probably worth mentioning that, given the socioeconomic situation in the US, the folks pursuing this were mostly middle- or upper-class whites.  Folks still struggling to make a living or what have you didn’t have the resources to worry about health foods or exercise.   Some things never change there either (look at who shops for Organic and health foods or pays $20 per workout at a Crossfit box; it’s not poor people).

At some point (I’m not a historian of this by any stretch), the earliest magazines devoted to the topic would start to appear (Strength and Health was around as early as 1932). It’s worth noting that, to a great degree, these magazines were as much about physical culture as they were to provide relatively ‘safe’ homosexual pornography (some magazines today are no different, you won’t find a single picture of a woman in them but you will find buff dudes in a fireman’s outfit straddling a big hose).

The general attitude towards the folks going into this activity, especially bodybuilding was no different. There was sort of an assumption of being a bit ‘light in the loafers’ for anybody pursuing this; at the very least folks pursuing this were seen as self-absorbed narcissists (this would have been especially true in the team-sport oriented US in the early 20th century).

The movements just wasn’t accepted by the mainstream on any level and wouldn’t really start to gain any sort of popularity until the 50′s and 60′s (and even there only in small enclaves such as California where being fit and healthy was part of the lifestyle).

Mind you, the above isn’t a joke and it’s not meant to be derogatory, it’s just a statement of fact and of the times. Women weren’t lifting weights (Marilyn Monroe would be one of the first mainstream women to jog or lift weights but that was decades away) to any great degree at this point in the first place and you sure didn’t see the girly photo layouts that dominate many of the magazines nowadays. It was just buff dudes in their underwear. This is one of many such pictures from Bob Hoffman’s book from the above link. It’s just pages of this.

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Ass

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Mind you, once you got past the beefcake photos, there was occasionally training information to be found all of which was the most profoundly basic stuff. And given the ‘technology’ of the day it was based around basic barbell training. Nothing else existed and, even if it had, nobody would have had access to it.

Any gyms that would have existed would have been the same, based around the most basic of implements because that’s all that there was at the time. What ‘machines’ were in existence at the time were rudimentary at best. I mean, consider that this is how you did a leg pressing motion during this time. If you lifted weights on any level, you did barbell training (or used club bells or whatever old timey thing is currently making a retro comeback).

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Check out those boots

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In any case, in that Olympic lifting had become an Olympic sport and seeing who could lift the most was at least some part of the movement. And with the emphasis on overall athleticism along with whatever innate drive makes men want to put shit over their head, there was certainly an interest in the quick lifts (as the Olympic lifts are often called).

And when you couple that with a lack of other competitive options (except perhaps the odd lifts which are still contested by the Odd Lifts Strength Association) you can see how men of the day might be drawn towards ‘weightlifting’ as a competitive activity.

But the simple fact that was, in this small subculture, anyone interested in getting into it was going to be exposed to a fairly limited number of things in terms of weight lifting. And that was basic barbell training including, most likely, the overhead/Olympic lifts. So even though the total number of folks interested in this was never that large (and certainly OL’ing in the US, even during this time was never more than a very niche activity) they were getting channeled into this one very limited set of activities when they did pursue it.

Of course that still requires people entering the sport. So were the people getting into this other than obsessed older folks who were worried about their health? Well, it’s the same group that has pursued the activity perennially.

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Mom, Dad, I Wanna Get Jacked

There are few consistencies in the world but one of them is that young dudes coming up, for whatever reason, want to get big and strong. Maybe it’s because they were picked on as kids, or were sickly and wanted to be healthier, maybe they thought it would get them girls (it’s usually this). But it’s part of puberty for a lot of males. Maybe they couldn’t or didn’t want to play team sports, whatever. The motivation is ultimately sort of irrelevant, the end result is what matters.

For younger males with a desire to get big or strong and who had neither the talent nor inclination for the team sports, getting into the physical culture movement of the day was about the only outlet available. This might mean joining one of the handful of gyms that existed (invariably dungeon like affairs where large many men did large manly things with barbells).

Alternately, a kid who wanted to get big, strong or whatever could pick up on of the handful of magazines that were in existence at the time. As is true today, they acted as a combination of information (and often mis-information) dissemination devices; mostly they existed to sell product, supplements and equipment and used articles and pictures of buff folks to do it. Nothing ever changes.

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Strength and Health

As I mentioned above, Strength and Health magazine was started in 1932 and ran for decades, it was one of the earliest magazines decided to anything related to the physical culture movement. In it kids could see images of men who were larger than life, who were strong and who, more importantly looked the way that they wanted to look.  Here’s a random cover.

Developing Personality?

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America has always had a bit of a ‘form over function’ fascination and despite some romanticizing of a lost era, it’s not much different here. Americans are often more interested in how they look than how they perform. It’s simply that, in the early and middle part of the 20th century, there wasn’t much of a distinction between the two. If working on basic barbell training and the overhead lifts is what got you jacked, that’s what you did.

And as it turned out the sport of Olympic lifting at this time was geared more towards muscularity and maximum strength due both to the inclusion of the press and a peculiarity of the rules at the time (that I missed in an earlier section and will address tomorrow). It was common as hell for Olympic lifters during the US’s heyday to compete in bodybuilding competitions and the overall jackedness (especially in the arms and delts) of the day’s Ol’ers was certain to pull young wannabes into the sport. As Glenn Pendlay put it to me in email:

So he [Hoffman] had to promote guys who looked like what your average pimple faced teenager wanted to look like. And this was the big pressers.  Many guys have won world or Olympic medals in OL in the last 20 years without a physique that would “wow” the average teenager. On the other hand, if you press 400lbs you’re gonna have big guns.

Strength and Health was also part of the rapidly growing supplement industry and the US, as an industrialized and economically stable environment had pretty good nutrition available to most people.  Of course, interest wasn’t enough, kids still needed a way to actually pursue this activity.

And it’s not as if commercial gyms really existed to the degree that they do this time. When they did, they were typically dungeon like affairs with manly men doing manly things with a barbell. If nothing else this provided small enclaves of support, coaching, etc. where newbies could get instruction on how to do the lifts. Inasmuch as technique was understood at this point (it was still being developed), newbies to the activity could get instruction.

But these were only in small enclaves and hard to find, not everybody would have had access. So how would an up and coming teen have gotten into barbell training?

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Hoffman and York Barbell

I didn’t pick Bob Hoffman out of the blue above when I posted the beefcake picture. A lifter himself, he probably played as much of a role in the development of US Olympic lifting as anybody else (both in a good and bad way). As part of the growing physical culture movement and seeing a great capitalist opportunity, Hoffman would form York Barbell Company in 1932 to sell a variety of things, not the least of which was the basic barbell set.

Kids wanting to get into the activity would buy Hoffman’s set and, along with anything else, would get a sheet showing basic barbell exercises. There’s not a hell of a lot more you can do at home anyhow and many lifters of the day tell stories of how they got their start in the iron game with a York set. Hoffman had brought barbell training to the ‘masses’ (well, the masses of young wannabes) as a function of living in an industrialized capitalist country.

Mind you, Hoffman’s involvement in the sport went much further than this.  He put on competitions and provided support and incentives for the athletes, sending them overseas, giving them jobs so that they would be able to train, etc.  His involvement in the sport and any success the US had simply cannot be overstated (though he might end up doing as much harm when all was said and done as I’ll talk about tomorrow and Charniga talks about in detail in the sources below).

A Mid-Article Summary

So already you can see some similarities to this brief period of US history in Olympic lifting and other parts of this series, it was part of why I wanted to discuss the situation in speedskating since I see a number of parallels between the two. Certainly the physical culture movement as a whole was not massive during this period, it was never more than a cult movement (even now it’s not more than a cult movement even as far more people are ‘aware’ of the benefits of weight training and activity). And it’s not as if the sport of Olympic lifting was ever going to be well known in the US; it certainly wouldn’t have been during this time.

But to the people involved in the subculture, the folks already involved along with the kids coming into it, OL’ers were what was promoted through outlets such as Strength and Health. OL’ers were big, strong men, more importantly the nature of the sport and the athletes meant that they looked the part. Kids had heroes to look up to, giants of men who were able to lift more than they could conceive of and made them want to pursue the sport.

Which combined with the limited options available in the sport. It was basically Olympic lifting or bodybuilding and most guys did both (Tommy Kono, one of our greatest Olympic Lifters routinely won physique competitions and early AAU bodybuilding shows had a clean and jerk as part of the overall score).

And Hoffman was providing at least some support for the athletes along with his commercial products that allowed them to get into the activity; gyms that existed would have provided at least some support and coaching and it’s not as if they were filled with fancy machines. If you trained at them you did barbell training. That’s all there was.

So we had at least some numbers, all of whom were more or less pursuing this one activity, who had support, coaching, at least sufficient access (and most likely in certain areas of the country such as California where everyone wanted to look good for the beach, or the East Coast where all you could do in the winter was train in your basement or garage), you get the idea.

But you may have noticed that there is something else that I haven’t really talked about.

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Where in the Hell Were the Europeans and Everyone Else?

There was another big factor at play here which is this: all of the communist and socialist countries that would later come to dominate the sport of Olympic lifting weren’t really on the playfield yet. The Soviet Union only entered the Olympic games in the 1950′s and many of the other countries were a little too busy rebuilding from the destruction of the war to worry about sports.

Or were too poor (as in the case of Poland who simply didn’t have equipment until the Soviets gave it to them) to pursue sport on any level. OL’ing may have been relatively inexpensive as a sport but a country that is poor is a poor country; to have equipment for the numbers that want to do it still takes resources. Resources that nobody else had but that the US had in spades.

Tangentially, this reminds me of a situation that often existed in the US in the early 20th century where it wasn’t uncommon for rich schools to just destroy poor schools in sports like football. My own high school has scorebooks going back to that time and scores of like 127-0 are not unheard of.  In football.  I’m fairly sure it’s because my school could afford equipment and the other schools couldn’t. Pursuing sport at the world level requires resources and most of the countries that would come to power starting in the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s didn’t have it when the US was dominating.

So, again while not taking anything away from the US Ol’ers, they weren’t yet competing against the best.

And there’s a final issue here and then I’ll wrap up. An issue that not only helped the US dominate the sport during its heyday but would also harm it when things started to change.

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The Sport

Keep in mind the sport of Olympic lifting of the time, this was pre-1972 when the press was still being contested. That meant the total in the sport was determined by the snatch (a technical/speed lift with less weight), the clean and jerk (more of a strength lift) and the clean and press (a pure strength lift). With the latter two movements making up a far greater percentage of the total because of the weights involved.

Note: there was also a technical rule in place that made even the snatch and clean and jerk of the day more maximum strength and upper body related and thanks to Josh for reminding me of it via email.  I’ll describe this tomorrow.

A guy could more or less suck at the snatch and just make it up by being strong as hell in the clean/jerk or clean/press (not unlike a weak bencher making it up in the deadlift in powerlifting). Which fit what US lifters wanted to focus on anyhow which was getting big and strong, especially in their upper body. You could give up a bunch of kilos in the snatch to a lifter who focused on it and then destroy them with the other two lifts because you could make up so much ground.

And US programming had come out of a very maximum strength/muscle size kind of approach since that’s what the early physical culturists were all about. And that type of training was at least workable given the nature of the sport and the level of the competition. It may not have been optimal given the nature of the OL’s but it worked sufficiently at the time.

And it’s a type of training that we are still obsessed with to this day.  Why?  Well, because bigger numbers are better than smaller numbers primarily.   And because there is this underlying assumption or logic that if you just push the numbers up in the basic strength lifts, everything else will come along with it.

You still see this in sports, strength coaches are just obsessed with driving up gym numbers even if it’s not really helping performance on the field or whatever.  Other countries have moved past this long ago, in the US folks still obsess about big numbers (with silly shit like claiming that football players all need an elite total or MMA guys need a triple bodyweight deadlift). 

And basically, US Olympic lifters, coming out of that type of simple background, focused on maximum strength and muscle size, using that to overcome any limitations in their technique along with making up anything they lost in the clean and jerk and clean and press. 

Without getting deeply into this issue, I also have it on good authority that lifters of the day were using anabolics (keep in mind that the first steroid was synthesized in the 40′s and it would be naive to think that athletes weren’t using them pretty damn early) although I can’t provide my source for what should be obvious reasons.  But all of that was able to let the US ‘get by’ in a climate of relatively little outside competition.

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Conclusion

And that’s what was going on, it was just this odd confluence of factors that all came together in just the right way and allowed the US to dominate the sport of Oling for a 12 year span. The physical culture movement (based around strength and muscle size), the nature of the lifts of the day (with the total being weighted towards the more strength oriented lifts, along with the technique and rules of the day), the growing supplement and nutrition industry and the fact that most in the US had access to things like vegetables, and food.

There was our economic structure (allowing folks like Hoffman to disseminate ideas and images of Ol’ers along with equipment), the fact that pimply faced teens have always wanted to be big and strong to get chicks, the fact that the only type of weight training available was basic barbell training. 

Again, I think the situation was somewhat akin to that of US Speedskating which was one reason I wanted to discuss it.  Because although the numbers were never massive, the numbers that were present were being channeled to this one activity, one that had at least decent access, some sort of informational and coaching structure, etc.  It wasn’t a big group of folks but it may have been big enough.

It didn’t hurt that almost none of the countries that would later come to dominate the sport weren’t really on the playfield yet since they were a bit too busy trying to rebuild their cities.    Here the situation diverges from that of speedskating as the US has regularly held it’s own against the best in the world (though interestingly the US was better in the sprints while other countries did better in the distances so our best weren’t really competing against the best from Norway or Sweden to some degree) at least up until recently. 

So for this brief period, everything sort of came together even if some (such as Charniga, sourced below) feel that it was more an issue of the Americans getting by on raw strength, poor technique (and possibly anabolic use) against a relative lack of competition than a true golden age.   US Olympic lifters during their ‘Golden Age’ may not have had the same level of competition to contend with.  Which in no way detracts from their success, but it does paint a bit of a different picture.

And if nothing else, the brief time that the US spent at the top would have a number of consequences going forwards, not the least of which was that, since it had worked before, the American lifting community would have a problem adjusting to the changing nature of the sport.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

In any case, US dominance wouldn’t last; in fact it would come to an end rather abruptly as I described last Friday.   And that makes it interesting to look at what happened and why it changed seemingly overnight.

Sources
There Is No System Parts 1-6 by Bud Charniga. Glenn Pendlay pointed me to this series and you won’t believe it but I had actually written most of the above before reading it (I did pick up some details from his writings). In it Bud (who did the early English translations of Russian OL’ing information and has written tons about it on his horribly formatted site) discusses the history of OL’ing in the US along with what changed in the 60′s. You’ll see reference to much of what he said in tomorrow’s piece when I look at what happend to US Ol’ing.  I’d note that Part 2 has some interesting data on Medal counts and percentages and how they shifted over the decades.  Part 3 also talks about the supposed myth of the American Golden age.
Milo magazine.  Milo is an excellent periodical published by Ironmind and I’ll be citing it again in this series.  But you can find a lot of stories about Hoffman and the old York days in the back issues if you are so inclined.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 7.

Location/Equipment

From an equipment point of view, Olympic lifting is actually a relatively ‘easy’ sport compared to many. You need a proper bar (and OL’ing bars are different than bars for general use or powerlifting in terms of how they flex and spin), bumper plates (special plates that are meant to be dropped and bounce), squat stands and, strictly speaking, little else. In the early days of the sport, the plates weren’t even bumpers; many old school coaches still teach lowering the bar under muscular control for this reason; when they were coming up you couldn’t drop bars or you’d ruin the plates, lifting surface or both.

A platform (a lifting area made to absorb the impact of bars being dropped) is nice but many lift without one. And while things like jerk stands/blocks or pulling blocks are nice (they allow the bar to be started in different positions to work on weak points or work different ‘parts’ of the lifts) they are far from required. Many get by with a bar, plates and squat stands. Most Olympic lifters also wear special heeled shoes with a very hard bottom as well. The bottom is necessary to ensure that the force of the lifter goes into the platform (rather than being lost to squishy shoes) and the heel facilitates the necessary squatting positions.

So strictly speaking, anywhere you can lift weights you can do the Olympic lifts. Which isn’t to say that facilities are necessarily easy to find. The equipment is specialized (and you tend ruin bars and bumpers if you use them for more traditional movements) and are not necessarily super inexpensive (note that bars and bumpers can range from basic training sets to elite competition sets milled to the utmost in terms of precision and bearing quality and such).

But at a fundamental level, the sport can be done anywhere you can lift weights.

Genetics and Physiology

In the last two parts of this never-ending series, I talked about some of the requirements for success in Olympic lifting and that leads logically into the genetics and physiology issue. Once again Ol’ing is a sport which has a fairly mixed set of requirements in that it relies on some amount of both maximum and explosive strength, movement speed (especially the ability to turn on or turn off muscles rapidly during different phases of the movement), rate of force development and others including generally ‘optimal’ proportions of body lengths (not that there aren’t exceptions).

Of course there are other factors such as technique, fearlessness and the rest but those have more to do with training and exposure than anything physiological or genetic. Even the muscle mass issue can be addressed with long term training and the existence of a number of different weight classes doesn’t set any real ‘weight’ or ‘muscle mass’ requirements as you might see in something like American football (where a guy who is too small will simply get decimated).

And frankly, looking at that set of physiological requirements, you would expect the sport and its requirements to point to a fairly idealized single ethnic group, one which happens to be fairly underrepresented in the sport. And it’s the same group that tends to dominate other explosive sports such as the short sprints in track and field along with basketball and some other related activities (where success is predicated on explosiveness, etc.) And that group is blacks of West African descent.

Which for primarily sociocultural reasons have not been highly represented in the sport. Once again this is primarily a function of the countries that have traditionally been dominant, at least in the modern era (and this is where today’s piece is going to go south as I try to make my point without giving away the punchline) which are mostly Eastern European countries like the Soviet Union and all of the countries that it comprised, Bulgaria, etc.

Certainly the Cuban lifters are on the brown end of things but for the most part, outside of a few American lifters, there have not been many blacks in the sport. Even if you would predict that they would be exceedingly successful. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. One last tangent.

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Another One for the Ladies

First an apology, like 14 weeks ago I promised my female readers (both of them) that I’d be devoting an entire day to the issue of gender in sports. But then this horridly unplanned series got out of my control and that meant something had to be cut. And that included my drastically oversimplified look at the issue of women’s sports that was meant to be given an entire day but will only get a single section instead. Maybe I’ll publish my rambling separately and link to it or do it later or something, we’ll see. Just chalk up my shorting of women’s issues to my being part of the oppressive white male hegemony (OWMH).

Because the simple fact is that, for the history of sports, women’s sports have lived in the shadow of men’s sports in most ways. I’ve touched on some of them already and will only briefly repeat them here. A big one I made earlier is that , for mostly cultural/traditional reasons women have not been allowed to or really pursued sport to the same degree as men. I also made the point that this often leads to a more mixed bag in terms of success at the top levels; countries that are dominating the men’s events often don’t dominate the women’s events simply because their women aren’t going into the sport.

This not only allows for more variety at the top level (i.e. you will still see non-Kenyan women on the podium in runing races where the last American man to win Olympic gold in the Marathon was in 1974) but at a fundamental level makes it ‘easier’ for women to reach the top level (a point I made when I talked about cycling at the collegiate level). The degree of competition just isn’t there since there are fewer women competing. Please don’t misread this paragraph the wrong way, I’m not saying it’s ‘easy’ to get to the highest levels. Just that relative to men, it is proportionally ‘easier’ due to a lack of numbers.

It’s only been recently that women have even been allowed to compete in sport in the first place. As recently as the early part of 20th century, it was thought that women were too fragile to do many sports, experts of the day felt that a marathon might do permanent damage or make them unable to make babies. This is of course, patently ridiculous. Anyone who has watched women’s field hockey or rugby realizes that both sports are both unimaginably brutal (and hot) at the same time. Women are not fragile in this way. At least not the women who pursue these types of sports.

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This makes me feel funny in my pants.

Kissing is part of rugby, right?

Many of these ideas maintain to this day, just out of the inertia of ignorance. I worked at a wellness center in the mid 1990′s where a physician told a female that the Stairmaster would make her ovaries swell; women who lift weights often deal with their parents telling them that lifting heavy weights will make them infertile or just make them so bulky that no man will want them. Women often live in perpetual fear that so much as looking at a weight heavier than 5 pounds will make them huge. If only it were that easy.

Even when women are allowed to compete, they often aren’t taken seriously, guys think it’s cute (so long as the girls are too) but the real athletes are the men. Regarding ice speedskating, my friend Eva was once told “Who cares about the women, they’ll never go as fast as the men.” I have no idea how prevalent this is but given that folks watch sports to see the ‘best’ (fastest, strongest, etc.), the realities of physiological differences do put women at a disadvantage.

In most sports, women are a solid 8-10% behind men’s results for reasons I’m not going into here. There are a couple of odd exceptions (i.e. long distance open water swimming) where women outperform men but in most sports, women are always slower, weaker, etc. at the elite level. Folks who want to see the ‘best’ don’t get it in women’s sports. And I’m not saying this to be mean, it’s just a statement of physiological fact. And don’t misread it, I know that the best elite woman can beat the average man, I’m only comparing the elite man to the elite woman; and the woman will always be about 10% behind.

In some sports, women have traditionally been disallowed from competition; there have often been clear distinctions between ‘mens’ sports and ‘womens’ sports. In the US at least, with the passing of Title IX, this has changed somewhat (and caused great controversy) and I even pointed out an oddity where a women’s ‘version’ of a specific sport (in this case, fast pitch softball) is actually scarier and harder than the men’s version.

But often women are only allowed to do things (at least in the US) that make men horny. Foxy boxing, Lingerie Baseball, shit like that. Women are supposed to giggle and make cookies for their boyfriend athletes, not pull 3 wheels sumo. It goes even deeper where women who pursue ‘real’ sports are often de facto assumed to be lesbians. Which is only acceptable to men in the US if they are the ‘right kind’ of lesbians (i.e. the kind men can jerk off to in porn before the plumber shows up).

This is maintained in the fact that, in some sports, women are held to a different set of rules or standards than men. For example, in speed skating, women don’t compete in the 10,000m, their longest race is the 5,000m. Just a leftover of 100 year old ignorance and tradition (simply: if you can complete a 5k, you can complete a 10k). And men don’t officially compete the 3k, that’s a ‘womens’ distance. Other sports have this too, the women’s events are shorter, easier, or whatever than the men’s.

Moving to OL’ing, you see some similarly silly ideas, especially in the weight classes. Because whereas the men’s superheavy weight class is 105kg+ (231 lbs), the women’s limit is 75kg+ (165 lbs). So a 76 kg (167 lbs) woman and a 120 kg (244 lb) woman are considered identical. It’s as if no ‘normal’ woman could weigh more than 75kg without being a monster. And men wonder why women think that 60kg (132 lbs) is an ‘appropriate’ women’s weight.

And the only real point of the above is to make the major point that, for traditional, historical, sociocultural and physiological reasons, women’s competition in sport has never been as high as in the men’s. This is changing as more women are interested in and being allowed to enter sports. But that’s a fairly recent development.

Mind you, some countries took distinct advantage of the above, especially given a rather lax attitude towards doping. Given how women respond to steroids compared to men (women get a more pronounced response), coupled with overall lower levels of involvement and, hence, competition, countries like the GDR and China have been able to dominate the women’s events.

So why am I discussing all of this seemingly irrelevant crap here? Because there is an odd blip in the data of what I am about to discuss that is often brought up in regards to the issue of the US and Olympic lifting, a data point that makes people argue “See, see, the US can get it done.” And it’s a data point that while interesting, I don’t think means very much. And I didn’t just want to dismiss it out of hand without explaining why I don’t think it means much.

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There’s Nothing Like a Woman’s Snatch

Because, for the roughly 4 people still reading this nonsense, I have a few questions starting with this one: Do you remember when I made that big point about how most of the big Eastern European/Communist/Socialist countries were using the Olympics and international sports success as a springboard to prove their political ideology? I hope so.

But, given that, have you ever wondered why we don’t really hear anything about great female Russian Olympic lifters? Or Bulgarians? Or any of those other countries that regularly produce great OL’ers, why don’t we hear about the women (inasmuch as we hear about Olympic lifters at all)?

Or why, besides his obvious hardon for the men, do Randall Strossen’s training hall tapes never show more than maybe one woman (before he rapidly rushes to show video of a guy squatting while gushing about it being ‘No-No-No’)? In contrast, why did the Chinese women dominate the sport in 2008 in a way that those other traditionally countries didn’t?

Well here’s why: women’s Olympic lifting has only had a world championship since 1987 and was only added to the summer Olympics roster in the year 2000. This is in a sport with nearly a 100 year history and women have only competed at a global level for the last 30 years, only in the Olympics for 3 Olympiads.

And with the exception of China (who dominated female OL’ing at Beijing as I previously described), most of the countries I talked about, the former Soviet Union, the GDR, Bulgaria really had their heyday in the 70′s and 80′s, before any of that developed. They didn’t bother to develop many female Olympic lifters for the simple fact that the women didn’t have competitions that mattered (especially without the Olympics). Women’s competition only got serious when those countries were a bit past their real heyday so they didn’t bother (Russia is a possible exception as the medal charts show but their women lifters still can’t hold a candle to the Chinese). So they just never really gave a damn.

But as soon as weightlifting was added to the summer games, China gave a supreme damn and their efforts in the sport showed immediately. In 2000, they took 4 of the 7 available women’s golds. In 2004 they took 3 of the 7 available golds and one silver. I already described how they did in 2008. Mind you, as the graphs in those links show, Russia and Belarus did win a medal here and there but it was nothing like their success in the men’s events.

But there is another oddity, the real point of all this babbling and that is this: in the year 2000, due I suspect to the above (the novelty of the event, the realities of the dominating countries in the sport, etc.) something interesting happened in Olympic lifting. Which is that the US actually did win two medals: one bronze medal (Cheryl Hayworth at 75kg+) and one GOLD medal (Tara Nott at 48kg). And while I’m not going to Google them up, I believe American women had similar successful showings in the earlier World Championships.

And we won exactly zippo in 2004 and 2008 with the women performing at about the same level as the men’s team (in 2008, the women had two 6th place finishes, a 12th and a 14th, the men in contrast had one 8th and one bomb out). So in the 8 years from when women’s OL’ing was made an Olympic sport, the women went from the medal stand to the exact place that the American men have been. So while it’s interesting, I don’t think it really proves anything. Nor is it relevant to my overall topic for reasons you’ll soon see.

Please do not misread this, I’m not trying to take anything away from our two female medalists. They sacrificed their lives to pursue a niche sport and performed at the highest levels and that’s impressive regardless of the circumstances. But I don’t think their medals prove anything. Because in 2000, they weren’t going against countries devoting much energy to the sport (except China really and it wouldn’t surprise me if they just didn’t have a lifter in the 48kg class or they’d have won that too). And now that other countries are, the US women are in the same place as the US men.

Which is just a very long way of saying that for the rest of this series, I’ll be focusing exclusively on the men and their performance or lack thereof. But first one last question.

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Why Does This Matter Anyhow?

Before finally addressing success in the sport or the lack thereof, I want to pose a question that may seem obvious: Why does this matter? That is, why do Olympic lifters (or all 12 non-lifters who follow the sport) in the United States give such a damn about this topic, about our inability to succeed at the global stage in this particular sport in the modern era?

I mean, there are a ton of marginalized Olympic sports in this country, sports that nobody cares about, nobody knows about and that we don’t really produce results in. And either I just don’t see it being bitched about (because I’m not on, I don’t know, ping pong forums) or it’s just not something that folks in these other sports care about. So why is this issue so damn important to Olympic lifters in this country? Finally, I can get to the damn point.

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Who’s The Best?

Because despite the title of this series and despite what I may have sort of been implying, when you look at overall US performance in men’s Olympic lifting (remember, a sport contested since 1904), we actually stack up pretty well. Here are the top 4 medal earning countries in the sport (I added Bulgaria for what will hopefully be obvious reasons). Once you move past #4, everybody drops off massively with France at 15 total medals and everyone else with less.

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So actually not too bad in terms of overall standing. The Soviet Union and Russia (and you’d really need to add in all of the other countries like Belarus that came out of the old USSR) is overwhelmingly dominant and the next 3 aren’t too far off from one another. Mind you’d you’d need to remove the single gold and bronze for the women but it doesn’t really impact on the numbers. I’d also mention again that in 1904, American men swept one of the events because they were the only three competitors. Even if you subtract those, nothing really changes.

So what’s the big deal, we’re #3 in the rankings overall, why is this even an issue? The reason is one of timing, an issue I haven’t delved into in any other parts of the series but which is critical here. Because once you take out the weird 1904 results and a couple of random medals in the 70′s and 80′s, you find that almost the entirety of America’s total medal haul occurs between 1948 and 1960 (this is different than in other sports where we continue to medal to this day). In 1956 for example we dominated the sport the way China did in 2008 with a medal in every category including 4 golds, 2 silvers and a bronze.

I mean we just dominated the sport for that brief period as shown in the USA Weightlifting Overall Results. And then it all fell off with a sporadic medal here and there over the next 20 years, no golds in that time period and not a single medal in the sport since 1984 except for the two women’s medals in 2000. So that’s 51 years without a gold medal and 36 years without a men’s medal of any kind with a handful of top 10 finishes at best. In a sport that we just utterly owned for 12 straight years.

And it’s not like the marathon example I trotted out (ho ho) where an American man hasn’t taken gold since 1972 (it was Frank Shorter as I recall). The Kenyans were coming up about that point and nobody can hold a candle to them.  OL’ing is a sport dominated by pasty white Europeans and the fact is that America has the folks who should be the real talent in the sport based on physiological considerations: blacks of West African descent. Notably some of our highest finishes in recent years have been by black lifters, Wes Barnett (6th in 1996) and Kendrick Farris (8th in 2008) for example.  And we’re still getting ass-kicked by pasty white Europeans.

The Soviet Union/Former USSR, Bulgaria, Cuba, Greece, Qatar, the top superheavy weight is Iranian; sometimes it’s hard to say since athletes float around or get bought or sold and change their names. Who they are competing for may not be where they are from.  These are the countries that are and have been dominating the sport of Olympic lifting for the past 50 years.

Of some interest, someone on my support forum threw out that of the 90 medals won in the last two Olympic games, only one was won by an athlete from an affluent Western country with zero medals won by athletes from affluent countries.  Maybe the solution to US OL’ing is money but not in the way most think: maybe when the US economy collapses completely, we’ll get back on top of the sport.  Because apparently affluence is negatively correlated with success in the sport.  Yes, I’m joking.

Which is why this topic is an issue to Olympic lifters. Because we went from complete and utter dominance of the sport to nearly zero results and it seems to have just happened overnight (in 1956 we medalled in every category, in 1960, we medalled in 6 of 9 categories, in 1964 we won two total medals).

That’s what separates it from the other marginal niche sports in this country; the fact that we did produce in it at one point and now utterly fail to do the same (our results have gotten so bad that we can barely earn slots at the Olympics; those slots being earned by World Cup performances). And that issue is at the heart of this series, raising two important quetsions:

1. What was going on during that time period that let us just dominate the sport to a nearly unprecedented degree?
2. What in the hell happened?

And hopefully in addressing those questions you’ll see why I spent 22 freaking parts looking at all of the other stuff in the series. Maybe. See you Monday.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 6.

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Muscle Mass

At a first approximation, muscle mass would seem to be important to OL’ers and it is to some degree. First keep in mind that Olympic lifters compete within rigidly defined weight classes (though they tend to manipulate water to actually make weight). This tends to limit how much muscle mass can be carried within any weight class except for superheavyweight lifters who can be as big as they want (and as often as not the extra weight is blubber around the middle).

But within any of the fixed weight classes, lifters can only carry the amount of muscle for their frame and height within the realm of realistic body fat percentages and what they can dehydrate and still make their class. Mind you, that’s also true of powerlifters. But remember that powerlifters compete in three lifts: two lower body and one upper body.  They have to have balanced musculature to compete in their sport because of the differences in the lifts.

In contrast, the great majority of the power output in Olympic lifting is generated by the legs and back. The pull from the floor, even the drive for the jerk is done with the legs. Back extension is involved in the movement and you need the strength to keep the spine locked into position during a heavy pull. Olympic lifters often have back development that is just insane. The following picture comes from Tommy Kono’s book, sourced yesterday.

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I'm Latman.

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In contrast, having big arms isn’t really an advantage because if you’re using your biceps to lift the weight you’re doing the lifts wrong. Quite in fact, guys with big guns or big triceps often lose flexibility and have all kinds of trouble racking their cleans. The same goes for delts. Remember that the jerk is being driven overhead by the power of the legs before the lifter drives himself under the bar. You don’t necessarily need big delts for that.

But you say, what about triceps, those must be important to lock out the jerk or hold a snatch overhead. Yes and no. Think about how much easier it is to hold a heavy barbell in the bench press than if you bend your elbows even a little bit. That’s because with the arms locked, you’re in what’s called bone on bone contact. Your muscles aren’t working that much because your joints are taking most of the stress. But bend your elbows at all and you get crushed.

It’s the same reason that you could take a monster bar out of the squat rack (within reason) and not crumple so long as you didn’t bend your knees. Sure, your upper back might collapse and your lower back might round; but so long as you keep your legs locked, you won’t collapse immediately.

Same thing here, a snatch and jerk are caught on locked out elbows or it’s not a legal lift. And you can hold a hell of a lot of weight that way so long as you don’t let them bend (which red lights you anyhow). And even the push under in the jerk is accomplished, recall, by pushing the body (unweighted by lifting the feet up) under the bar more than it’s pushing the bar up. And gravity is helping pull the body down. So it doesn’t require much triceps strength. And certainly not triceps size.

And within a given weight class, carrying a bunch of muscle mass in muscle groups that aren’t really that relevant to the sport means less muscle in the groups that are relevant. It’s not like the powerlifter I mentioned above who needs muscular delts and tris (and even bis) for benching. For an OL’er, beach muscles are often wasted muscle (tho see below).

I’d simply point out here that the muscularity of lifters has gone back and forth over the years (but see my comments below) depending on the lifter, the country, the weight class and probably the drugs being used. Some are jacked, some are not; some barely look like athletes. Here’s Vasily Alexeev (one of the best superheavies to ever touch the bar) and the Pocket Hercules, Naim I Can’t Spell His Last Name.

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MOOBS

Pocket Hercules

Finally, due to the technical aspect of the sport, it’s not uncommon to see lifters, especially in certain weight classes, who appear to be relatively unmuscled (especially as matched up against similar weight individuals in other strength/power sports). Again, this isn’t universal but it does happen. Especially snatch specialists since the lift is speed and technique dominant.

Even when lifters do have developed musculature, it is typically somewhat unbalanced due to the nature of the sport. Big legs are important, a big back is often seen. Big guns and delts, not so much. Though it’s worth noting that the Chinese Olympic lifters of late are just absolutely jacked and ripped. But this is a relatively recent development. But the Chinese actually do a lot of general bodybuilding work, work that most Ol’ers have not traditionally done since the pressing era.

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Christ look at that back

JACKED!

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And really my point here is not that muscle mass is or isn’t relevant. Some lifters are jacked and some aren’t. Usually even when they are, the muscle groups developed tend to be a bit imbalanced. It’s the opposite of the typical gym light bulb, when they are heavily muscled OL’ers are usually all lower body and back with far less importance or size development (generally) in the delts and arms.

Relevant to this, in general the OL’s, especially as they are commonly trained really aren’t that great for developing msucle mass. At least not in an overall sense. In fact, most OL’ers who want to gain muscle mass do it with non-specific movements.

Leg size is built with squatting and front squatting, as noted above the Chinese do general bodybuilding movements (I’ll talk about training paradigms shortly). But just doing the OL’s doesn’t really build muscle mass well, especially not when trained for lots of sets of low reps (how almost everybody does it). Maybe in the upper back.

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Maximum Strength

A common misconception is that OL’ing is about limit/maximum strength because, superficially it looks like other strength sports. And while strength is certainly a factor, it isn’t nearly as important as many think it is or are making it out to be (more accurately, it may be limiting for some but not for others and it’s certainly not universally true that driving up max strength will improve performance).  And this really has to do with what the limiting factors in OL’ing performance are which is why I summarized it above.

And those limiting factors, that is the weak points that determine whether or not you make the lift are: how much weight you can throw into the air (high enough to get under it), how quickly you move under the bar (assuming it has enough bar height), whether or not you can fix it overhead (and this is a function more of stabilization and proper technique than anything) and whether or not you can then stand up with it. 

In the snatch, leg strength is never limiting; if the bar is in position you can stand with it. In the clean and jerk, as I mentioned yesterday, certainly leg strength is a factor in the squat recovery. But having the bar in the right position, catching a bounce (an issue of timing, elasticity, etc.) is as if not more important than strength per se.

And even if a lifter does manage to grind to the top with a maximum front squat, they have less chance of making the jerk. Even when lifters push up squat strength, the focus is usually on their maximal ‘fast’ front squat (at the very least slow grinding squats are done rarely).  Not how much they can move slowly.  Here’s 200kgX5 by a Cuban lifter.  Not that even the last rep doesn’t get particularly grindy.  And you don’t see a lot of Ol’ers doing sets of 5 (the Cubans tend to use higher repetition ranges than other training systems).

And even of the above factors, the single limiting factor in the OL’s is this: throwing the bar high enough. Because if you don’t have the bar height in the first place, none of the rest of it matters anyhow since you can’t get under it.  Let me clarify this, I’m not saying that there aren’t a dozen other factors involved here.  Bar position, being able to hit the right positions, timing and a host of others contribute to whether or not a miss is made or lift.  As Glenn Pendlay pointed out to me in feedback on this section.

To me, this seems simplistic.  I think I would say, things like speed, the ability so sense and to hold the proper positions, a high RFD, the ability to switch muscles “on” or “off” quickly and at the appropriate time, proper timing, absolute strength, power, the proper ratios of strength between different muscle groups, and a “feel” for the bar.

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Another way to look at it is could be power production, could be lack of strength of the correct muscle groups to allow you to hold the correct positions to allow you to apply power in the right direction, could be lack of timing, could be lack of limit strength, etc, etc, etc.

I don’t disagree, this is part of what makes the OL’s so complex, difficult and fascinating.  The point I’m simply trying to make is that all of the above, while important, is still secondary to getting sufficient bar height.  Because a lifter can have all of the above, proper positions, speed, RFD, etc.; if the bar doesn’t get thrown high enough none of it matters.  I hope that makes sense. 

So let’s assume for the moment that all of the above is in place, the lifter has perfect position, timing, etc.  With that (poor) assumption, does maximum or limit strength (defined here roughly as 1 rep maximum) play much of a role in this singular aspect of the lift?  Or put more differently, once you’re past a certain threshold of strength, will driving up that limit strength necessarily improve your ability to explosively move a weight in the power position?  The answer according to most is no.  Let’s look at why this is the case since it seems illogical.

First consider that there is often a fairly low correlation between slow speed maximum/limit strength and explosive power especially once maximum strength gets beyond a certain point. Again, you need some threshold level of strength but once you get beyond a certain point, just getting stronger and stronger tends not to do much good or improve performance in explosive movements. In fact, it may even hurt (see below).

This is just a function of the whole rate of force development (RFD) issue which I must now explain. Most limit strength movements take a relatively long term (at least relative to most sporting movements) to occur. Perhaps it’s better to phrase is that they don’t tend to occur quickly (think about the duration of a maximum deadlift, squat or bench press). That is, lifters have quite a bit of time to generate maximum force in those types of lifts and they may end up generating almost a quasi-isometric during the sticking point which they can hopefully grind through.

In contrast, almost all explosive movements in sports isually take place in 0.1-0.2 seconds or less.  Because while the Ol’s themselves do take longer (a full snatch may take a full second if you count first and second pull along with the catch), the explosive phase per se is in that time range, about 0.2 seconds or so.

And simply, if the athlete can’t generate force in that time period, it’s not relevant to success because it can’t be utilized. The only force that matters is that which can be generated nearly instantaneously. Even in speed skating with it’s odd 1 second glide on one leg, the actual push part takes place in 0.2 seconds or so (the other 0.8 seconds is sitting on that leg wondering where your life went wrong). That’s where most sports live in terms of how much time the athlete has to generate maximum force.

This graphic shows what I’m talking about. Because although athlete A is physically stronger (if given half a second to generate force), athlete B will actually outperform him in any movement lasting 200ms or less. Because at the 100ms mark he’s actually generating more force because he can do it faster.

We Have Charts and Graphs to Back Us Up

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In fact, work by a researcher named Tidow (published in 1990 a paper titled “Aspects of Strength Training in Athletics” in New Studies in Athletics) has even found a negative correlation between maximum strength and movement speed. That is, the stronger someone gets (beyond a certain point), the LESS explosive they are. And certainly in most explosive sports (throws, etc.) in the modern era, there has been a far lower emphasis on maximum strength than in previous years.

Even in sprinting you simply don’t see the focus on maximum strength; no more 600 pound half squats as in the era of Ben Johnson. It’s more like double bodyweight and that’s more than enough. Rather, the focus is on technique, speed of movement and being ‘as strong as needed’ but no stronger.

Of course, in the throws, the weight of the implements is much lighter than in the OL’s and certainly one would expect the amount of maximum strength needed to be higher. But keep in mind the nature of the lifts and the determining factor in success which is how much weight can be thrown into the air and then caught (either on the chest in the clean or overhead in the snatch and jerk).

That is, how much weight you can haul to the power position is not relevant if you can’t throw it high enough to get under it for the catch; certainly how much you can haul to that position slowly is of fairly little relevance (many OL coaches make sure that even accessory work is only done if bar speed stays high).

A deadlift stops (and is deccelerating) when the OL’s really start (and the goal is acceleration) and strength in that movement beyond a certain point has no real impact on how much can be thrown during the third pull (since the limiting factor is what you can throw, what you can get off the floor is, by definition, not limiting).

Similarly, the jerk is not a press. In the jerk the power is being generated by leg drive and only very secondarily by arm drive (again mostly to push the lifter under the bar). Even the push press relies far more on arm drive than the jerk ever will (the Soviets felt that excess push press work could actually harm the jerk by teaching the lifter to drive with the arms excessively).

Finally, all of the squat strength in the world is only relevant if you can pull the weight to the catch position in the first place. Certainly you need enough to recover the front squat but, as I discussed when I talked about technique, all of that strength doesn’t matter if the bar is out of position in the first place and lifters with amazing technique often get by with only marginally higher front squat numbers than their best clean. You can front squat the world but if it lands too far in front of you, you’re not standing up with it.

The point being that, yes, maximum strength is part of OL’ing. But beyond a certain point it’s not only not beneficial to keep driving it up (as many OL’ers find out the hard way; they’ll spend months driving up their maximums in accessory work and find that their competition lifts haven’t budged) but can be detrimental. Either by causing a reduction in movement speed or simply by causing the lifter to put excessive time, energy and recuperative ability into something that isn’t the competition lifts.

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Explosive Strength

And basically following from the above discussion, it should be clear that while limit/maximum strength has, at most, a limited role for sucess or failure in the OL’s, explosive strength is the absolute key to the sport. And this is reflected in the modern training of Olympic lifters. The OL’s are inherently explosive/accelerative due to the fact that the bar is thrown. Contrast this to a movement like the squat or bench press which start and finish at zero velocity and there is actaully a decceleration phase at the end of the movement (unless you add chains or bands); in the OL’s you can, do and must accelerate all the way through the movement.

And this is reflected in the training of OL’ers.  All movements from the OL’s to themselves to assistance movements such as squats, pulls or good mornings are done in an explosive fashion since this not only mimicks how the OL’s themselves are done but gives the best transfer/carryover. For example, here’s a Chinese lifter doing 220kg (480 lbs in the back squat); notice the focus on acceleration.

Again, other movements are done similarly and arguably the greatest OL’ing coach in the history of the sport actually defines a maximum squat as the maximum that can be lifted rapidly; his guys could lift more if they went slowly but he doesn’t allow it because it’s not relevant to the sport.

Simply, slow grinding movements aren’t generally terribly relevant for the reasons I discussed above in the section on maximum strength because no aspect of the lift is or will be grinded (unlike powerlifting or strongman).  Rather, it’s the force that a lifter can generate rapidly that is relevant to success or failure in the lifts. And that explosive strength is usually trained in a specific fashion, focusing on acceleration above all and only using weights that not only can be accelerated well but also mimick the OL’s in terms of mechanics, bar position, etc.

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Pre-1972 vs. Post-1972 Olympic Lifting

To close it out today I want to make some comments about changes in some of what I talked about above in the pre-1972 vs. post-1972 eras of Olympic lifting. Keep in mind that 1972 was the year that the press was dropped and the sport moved to only the two ‘quick’ lifts: the snatch and clean and jerk.

Remember that the clean and press was a strength lift. It required more muscular development in the delts and triceps/arms along with more limit strength because it was a lift that could be ground through (unlike the other two lifts). When the press was dropped in 1972, that requirement was eliminated. Initially, it was thought that lifters would become much leaner and lighter since they would no longer have the requirement for what was seen as ‘unnecessary’ upper body muscle mass anymore.

And that certainly did happen to at least some degree especially in the earlier days of the sport. As I mentioned above, the muscularity of lifters is highly variable; too much so to make any particularly broad generalizations about it. It’s probably safe to say that a need for big delts and arms was minimized in the post-1972 era of the sport even if some lifters still like to build them (so long as it doesn’t impact on their ability to catch a clean or make weight). Dudes like big guns and that’s never gonna change.

I’d mention that a focus on optimizing technique in the lifts was really taking place around this time as the Eastern Europeans really put a lot of energy into analyzing the best way to lift a weight. And without taking anything away from the early athletes in the sport, the simple fact is that technique was not fantastic prior to the 60′s and 70′s.

This was true of most sports (again see my comments about speed skating in the era before indoor ovals and optimized technique); technique and implements were less well developed and many strength and power athletes just made up for it with brutal strength (i.e. Ben Johnson had a claimed 600 lb half squat and throwers often did 800 lb 1/4 squats which is about double of what anybody today would bother with).

To say that technique was rough in the early days of the sport is an understatement. And since the technique wasn’t there, they had to compensate by just being brutally strong. Paul Anderson is a good example; his technique in the lifts was at best mediocre. But he made up with it through such sheer brute strength that it just didn’t matter.  Were guys of this era strong?  Yes.  Was their technique pretty?  Not so much.

But as technique was being refined and figured, training started to change with a focus moving towards becoming technically proficient (and efficient) more than just muscling the weight. This was about the time that Abadjaev was cutting out assistance movements (most of which were meant to build strength or power in specific positions) and focusing on increasing training frequency (with near maximal weights as technique in the OL’s changes when you move from lower to higher intensities).

Everyone soon followed and high training frequencies in the competition lifts became the norm. This is true for both lifts but especially the snatch; technique is so sensitive there that lifters who go a day or two often lose their groove. Mind you this was only possible in systems where the athletes were paid to be full-time athletes (and have pretty strong incentives to the same stuff day after day). Unless you could train 2-3 times per day, you couldn’t do this.

In that vein, it’s not unheard of to hear of top powerlifters or strongmen who only train a given lift (or even the competition lifts) once per week. It’s still workable even if most are going to higher frequencies of competition lifting. But it does work. This simply doesn’t cut the mustard in OL’ing and it would be almost unheard of for any top Olympic lifter to not train the competition movements (in at least some fashion) on a near daily basis. Which, mind you, is facilitated by the go/no go nature of the lifts and the fact that they don’t grind the body down quite as hard as maximum PL’s.

Sources
Essential Components Weightlifting Technique: Part IV  While his site is awful (old style frames), Charniga has done a tremendous amount of writing on the OL’s.  In this article he looks at the idea of just jacking up maximal strength in the OL’s to raise competition results and why that approach is flawed.
Again thanks to Glenn Pendlay and others for their input on this and other parts of this series.

And having completed a look at the components necessary for weightlifting performance.  Tomorrow I’ll start looking issues of physiology and genetics and finally address who’s the best.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 5.

Summarizing Olympic Lifting

Lifters compete in two lifts, the snatch and clean and jerk (the press having been dropping in 1972); lifters get three chances for each lift and the goal is to lift the most weight a single time with the lifter’s total for each lift (only successful lifts are counted) determining the winner.  In general, depending on the dynamics of the event, lifters have at a minimum 2 minutes between lifts (only in the situation where they follow themselves); in most situations they will have longer than that. 

Recall from my discussion yesterday the basic nature of the lifts which is to throw a weight explosively so that it can be caught either overhead (the snatch), on the shoulders (clean) or overhead (the jerk). Which means that the critical part of the movement (the ‘weakest link’ so to speak) is how much weight can be thrown to a minimum required height for a legal catch.   That will determine how much is successfully lifted and everything else only contributes inasmuch as it contributes to that part of the movement.  Because none of the rest of the movement is relevant if you can’t get the bar high enough in the first place.

Even there, the snatch and clean and jerk differ.  Because the weights are lighter (again, 20% on average) in the snatch, it’s far more of a speed/explosion/technical lift.  The clean and jerk, relatively speaking, is more of a strength lift.  Even there, how much you can clean is based on how much weight you can throw into the air (and whether or not you can then get under it, get control of it, stand up with it, and then put it overhead).

In that vein, I’d mention that it is not uncommon for a lifter to be relatively better at cleaning than jerking or vice versa; since the lift is  determined by what you can do for the combined movement, this has the end result of letting the ‘weaker’ of the two lifts determining the maximum weight used.  

Put differently, a lifter can be a monster jerker, just strong as the world overhead.  But if they can’t clean nor stand up with the weight, it won’t matter because they never get to show off their jerk abilities.  By the same token, a lifter who can clean the world but can’t jerk to save their lives will be limited by the jerk unless they enter one of the many power clean competitions that are being held in recent years. 

And while I really don’t want to get deeply into gender differences, this is often more common in female lifters due to the difference in lower body vs. upper body strength.  Many women can pull to the shoulders in the clean far more than they can get or support overhead.  Women often need more direct upper body work for this reason and it’s interesting that the Chinese women had JACKED upper bodies and were stable as hell overhead in Beijing.

I’d also remind readers that the time between when the bar is thrown into the air and the lifter catches it is not long (find out time), a split second.  The ability to throw the bar up and then rapidly reverse and effectively ‘jump’ or ‘dive’ under the bar and do so before the bar falls too far. 

Movement speed and reaction time is also critical following the explosive ‘throw’ of the bar; the lifter has to be able to switch rapidly from throwing the bar up to moving underneath it while continuing to exert force upwards on the bar.  And again, the majority of force production comes from the lower body and back.  Other muscles are involved in accessory roles but those are the key groups.

So what physiological characteristics does all of the above require?

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Height/Body Proportions

First let’s look at body proportions since they are crucial here and a huge part of selection for Olympic lifting success.  You might remember how I mentioned way back when that, among other reasons, one of the reasons China dominated OL’ing is that shorter limb lengths tend to confer an advantage.  This is just a physics thing, longer levers take longer to move through space and top Ol’ers are often found to have very similarly related body proportions in terms of femur length, torso length, etc. 

Taller lifters also have way further to move to get from full extension to the squat under which puts them at a disadvantage compared to shorter guys; as any tall squatter knows it’s also more difficult to get stand up from the full squat position due to the long lever arm generated by the length of the leg.  Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been top lifters without those proportions.  They exist but they are in the minority.   Here’s one of them, Ivan Chakarov as an example of a highly successful but relatively taller lifter.

Body type/proportions is also relevant because the technique in the OL’s are less able to be changed compared to something like powerlifting.  A tall powerlifter can alter his squat stance, widening it, or his deadlift stance (perhaps pulling sumo) to compensate for poor levers or what have you.  He can alter his bench technique, change his flare, his arch, where he brings the bar, to adjust for levers that may not be optimal. 

The Ol’s are far less able to be modified by this due to the exacting technical nature of them.  You can make small adjustments in things like stance width or grip width but the specifics of the sport don’t allow for much variation.  You can’t pull a clean sumo to compensate for a long torso is what I’m saying.  So the body types that are set up for optimal performance of the lifts is far more limited compared to the other strength sports.

Mind you, this is at least one thing that many of the Eastern European countries with their heavy early selection and testing were looking at.  They knew what types of mechanics were best for certain sports and athletes were put into sports where they were most likely to succeed based on physiological characteristics (and predictions on what a kid with certain proportions would grow up to be physically).

I’d note that body proportions aren’t something we can do anything about, I mention it only because it can be a determining aspect of optimal performance.  Yet another reason you need numbers going into the sport, you not only have to deal with all of the other factors I’ll discuss today and tomorrow but also have that lifter have the right body proportions in the first place.

I’d mention that another body related factor is joint robustness.  The catch on the clean and snatch exert a big force and knees, wrists and elbows can often get beat up (elbow dislocations are not unheard of in the jerk) by the pounding of catching heavy weights.  Just another factor that needs to be in place for someone to be a successful as an OL’er.  It’s not something that you can massively control although progressive controlled loading over time does tend to strengthen joints and connective tissues.

So now let’s look at factors which are actually modifiable through training more or less from unimportant to massively important.

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Technique, Technique, Technique

In modern Olympic lifting, perhaps no single factor is more important than good technique.  This is actually true of most modern sports, where improvements in technique (and often the implements used in sport) along with the requirements for absolutely perfect technique is usually paramount for success. And in many sports have far outstripped issues of conditioning or what have you.

Mind you, this can actually vary across sports and I’d offer that certain sports are relatively less sensitive to poor technique than others.  Usually these are endurance events (where you can make up for a deficit in technique with grinding amounts of work); more to the point they are typically in activities that bear some resemblance to normal human movement patterns. 

Running and cycling are two examples. They both involve basic human movement patterns (combined hip, knee and ankle extension as occurs in normal human walking) with cycling simply being modified with gears.  And it’s not uncommon to see even top tier athletes with relatively poor technique that they compensate for with just enormous amounts of training.  Conditioning can overcome poor technique even at the highest levels in these types of sports.

But as you start moving further away from movements that are fairly ‘standard’ to humans, such as swimming or rowing, you start getting into a realm where conditioning really can’t make up for a lack of technique.  As I discussed previously, swimming is monstrously technical and folks aren’t even entirely sure how humans swim.  Good technique is critical and without it the most well-trained aerobic beast will just spin in the water. 

Speed skating is similar in this vein, completely divorced from normal human movement patterns (it’s hip extension but to the side in hip flexion with a rounded back) it’s a sport where technique really can’t be overcome with strength or conditioning.  A technically proficient swimmer or skater will beat a well-conditioned one any time (a technically proficient AND well-conditioned athlete will beat both of them of course) and you often see little kids with good technique dusting adults who are stronger and fitter.

Which is part of why I wanted to discuss those two specific sports in this series, in addition to the other reasons.  Because, even among the other strength/power sports, OL’ing is a hell of a lot more like swimming or speed skating than it is like powerlifting or strongman. 

Because in OL’ing, all of the strength, power, explosiveness in the world really doesn’t pay the bills if the technique is lacking (again moreso in the snatch than in the clean and jerk but it’s crucial to both).  Especially in the modern era (note my comments about how skating 3 decades ago was less technical and more conditioning based; swimming has seen similar evolutions in the modern era) which I’ll come back when I wrap up today.

Even in powerlifting, it’s not uncommon for lifters to overcome technical weaknesses by simply getting strong as all fuck.  As well, a powerlift that is slightly out of position can often be muscled back into position. That’s on top of a lot of different techniques being workable to achieve the goal.  Even in strongman competition, brute force strength can often overcome technique to at least some degree.    And, no, I’m not saying technique doesn’t matter in these sports; it’s just a matter of degrees and what you can get away with (amusingly you can get away with a lot more in outdoor inline speed skating than on the ice).

In OL, neither is really the case.  Technique in OL doesn’t vary that much beyond some small differences (usually having to do with individual differences in body mechanics or whatever) and the go/no go nature of it makes getting a missed lift back into position nearly impossible unless the deviation is very small.

That is to say, a squat can be saved if the lifter gets out of position.  A snatch can’t.  Technique in the OL’s is just at another level of importance to the other strength/power sports.  And don’t misread what I’m saying here, I’m not saying that technique in the PL’s or strongman is irrelevant, that would be stupid. But relatively speaking, technique (or the lack thereof) can be overcome with sheer brute force strength in those sports.  In OL’ing, it really can’t.  Certainly not in the modern era of the sport and most specifically not in the snatch. 

And as I hope to have gotten across yesterday, it’s not as if the technique of OL’ing is terribly natural.  Because while the basics can be taught in a short period of time, the details, the nuances, the rest of it can take years of grinding practice.   It’s not like some other movements which, again relatively speaking, can be learned and mastered relatively quickly. 

Again, without taking anything away from powerlifters, the fact is that bench pressing is a pretty trivial movement compared to a snatch.  You can teach the first to basic competency in a few hours or weeks at most (I realize that mastering GEAR is a totally different issue, I’m talking about a basic raw bench press).  Mastering the snatch can take a lifetime (har har) and even there a lifter having an off day will find themselves unable to snatch anywhere close to their best weights.  Their timing is off, their bar path is a hair off and suddenly they can’t do jack crap in the lift.

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Flexibility/Mobility

Flexibliity and mobility are also of prime importance in the lifts for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is having the ability to get into a deep squat position and maintain control of a heavy bar as it comes down on you and you resist gravity.  I mentioned previously that as lifters made the switch from the split versions of the lifts to the squat versions, many older lifters had a great deal of difficulty adapting, they simply weren’t able to develop the mobility needed later in life to do a good squat clean.    In the snatch, shoulder mobility is key for a proper bar path and catch.  Lifters without sufficient mobility or flexibliity often find themselves having great difficulty in various aspects of the lift.  The following picture, again from Tommy Kono’s book shows the difference in mobility between Ken Patera (a top US lifter of the day) and two European lifts.

A Supple Snatch

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The picture isn’t as big as I would have liked (click it for a larger version) but you can hopefully see that Patera’s bottom position in the snatch isn’t as low as the other two lifters.  Simply, he lacks the mobility to hit a true deep squat.

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Movement Speed/Fearlessness

I mentioned both of these yesterday but I want to reiterate them.  The ability to move quickly under the bar is another key to lift success.  How much of this can be trained and how much is inherent to the lifter I can’t really say but it is key.  Because no matter how high the bar is pulled, if the lifter can’t get under it quickly enough, the lift will still be lost.

Related to this is the fearlessness aspect of the OL’s, diving under a heavy bar that is literally falling down on top of you.  Many lifters balk or hesitate when it gets heavy (another reason to train with high loads consistently to get practice going under heavy bars) and that hesitation either results in a missed lift or worse.  Being able to commit 100% to throwing the bar and then getting under it is key to success. 

Again, much of this is a practice issue but it points out the benefits of starting young in the sport.  Little kids don’t have the same level of fear when they learn stuff like this (gymnastics is identical in this regard) and by the time the weights get scary heavy they are used to it.  Adults learning the lifts can take years to get to where they will commit to the lift 100%.

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Feel

There is another aspect of the OL’s, this is yet another reason I brought up swimming and speed skating in previous parts of the series.  And it can only be described as feel.   In swimming and on the ice it’s water and ice feel, feeling how you’re applying pressure to the medium to get the most out of it.  In OL’ing, I’m not sure what it is exactly: feeling where the bar is, making minor adjustements, feeling the flex of the bar, the whip of the plates.  The things that make that final difference in lifting ability.

This sounds like voodoo and probably is, it’s ephemeral and in all three sports it’s something that can’t be taught; it can only be learned.  Some seem to have it naturally, some learn it after some period of time, some never learn it.  It’s impossible to describe but you can watch two athletes in these sports who otherwise have identical technique and conditioning and one just ‘looks’ different.  You can’t exactly say what the difference is but it’s there.  Since I was doing so bad a job of describing this, I asked Glenn Pendlay if he could describe it. With his permission, here’s what he said:

It really is funny how some people can seemingly have it all.  big squat, can jump high and run fast, flexible, just strong and athletic.  And yet when you watch them lift, you can tell it just isnt clicking for them.  I mean even if they are technically correct, good line of pull, correct positions.  But “it” just isnt there and its almost impossible to quite put your finger on what you are talking about but you can just see it.  And they can even lift pretty good weights, but still you can just see that something is missing.

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And then you have other people who just right from the start just get it.  And you’re right, its not technique that I am talking about. I almost want to call it timing or rhythm, and thats part of it but doesn’t really describe it either.  And some people who don’t just have it from the start develop it, and some never do.

Again, it can’t be taught, it can only be learned.  Hell, it can barely be described.  But it exists.  Ok, moving on, let’s look at other factors of interest to OL performance.

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Age

A factor that I haven’t really discussed anywhere in this series is that of age on performance.  And without going into excessive detail, it’s a simple fact that most top performers in the sport start fairly young.  This isn’t universal and there are exceptions (Ben Johnson, for example, started relatively late for a track athlete; he was in his teens). 

But when you consider that mastering technique in complex movements can take upwards of 10 years or 10,000 hours (on average), that has some clear implications for technique heavy sports (such as swimming, speed skating and OL’ing).  Especially when you consider the realities of when strength/power athletes tend to hit their peak which is typically in the early to mid 20′s (note endurance athletes often hit their peak later in life, in their late 20 or early 30′s but we’re talking here about strength/power production). 

At the very latest, assuming a roughly 10 year period of learning, you’re looking at starting no later than age 14 or so to have a chance of reaching your potential by the time your strength/power output peaks.  Not that it can’t be done in shorter periods, mind you, just talking averages.    From a technical standpoint, from a joint robustness standpoint, from a fearlessness standpoint from a feel standpoint, the more time a lifter can put under the bar before hitting their peak (around their mid 20′s) the better.  

And as I pointed out when I talked about China, in the modern era, most start earlier than that.  A typical Chinese Ol’er has put 10 years under the bar by the time they are about to hit puberty. A lifter starting in their teens or later is simply at a nearly unassailable disadvantage compared to that.

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Endurance/Fitness

Endurance per se is of absolutely minimal importance to OL’ing, in this sense it is like some of the other pure strength/power sports like the throws in track and field or powerlifting (modern strongman events have a fairly high endurance component oddly enough). Reportedly many European OL’ers are chain smokers which should tell you just how irrelevant endurance is to this sport.

The lifts last a second or two at most with most of the real action happening in a tenth or two during the explode phase. It’s pure ATP/CP. And in competition there are only three attempts taken for 6 total lifts (with warm-ups). And unlike powerlifting meets which often take 8 hours to complete, OL meets move quickly and are over pretty fast so you don’t get exhausted just sitting around being bored.

I’d note that this may have been subtly more important back when all three lifts were contested, just because more had to be done both in training and competition. But even there it was only 9 lifts in competition and there was overlap between the clean and press and clean and jerk.

The only real endurance needed is for when a lifter follows themselves which means they have two minutes but that’s more than enough time for ATP/CP to be replenished after a missed lift. This is especially true given the go/no go nature of the lifts. In powerlifting, a missed lift where the lifter gets stuck in the middle can grind down the nervous system and require 5-10 minutes recovery. A missed lift in OL’ing does no such thing because even if a lifter misses the squat recovery, either he tries once or twice and gives up or he bounces back up.

The type of fatigue (especially CNS fatigue) seen in grindy lifts isn’t seen in the OL’s. You see this in the training of Ol’ers which I’ll talk about shortly. They generally take far shorter rests than powerlifters because of the nature of their lifts. So while a powerlifter might take 5-10 minutes between maximum lifts, an Ol’er might take 1-3 minutes. Quite in fact, many lifters find that they lose their OL’ing groove if they rest too LONG between reps (especially in the snatch).

About the only even remote component of OL’ing that might be related to endurance is really better defined as work capacity. Training in the modern era for the sport is based around either a lot of volume or a lot of frequency or both. Lifters have to develop the capacity to handle the training loads required to reach the highest levels; along with being able to recover quickly enough to do it again later in the day. This is simply built over years of progressively and gradually increasing training volume, intensity, frequency or all three.

Sources
The Sport of Olympic Weightlifting: Training for the Connoisseur by Carl Miller.  An otherwise forgettable (and slightly goofy) book, this has a good discussion of optimal body dimensions (and how technique can be altered) for Ol’ing.
I’d also refer everyone to yesterday’s part for book sources which talk about all of the above to one degree or another.

And that’s where I’ll cut it today. Tomorrow I’ll look at issues of muscle mass, maximum and explosive strength and finish by looking at how some of the above has changed from Pre-1972 to Post-1972 Olympic lifting all as a lead in for Friday’s examination of who’s the best and how the US has done both recently and historically in the sport.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 4.

Numerous books and hundreds if not thousands of pages of analysis have been dedicated to this topic, I’m spending a post on it.   So don’t get all twisted if I leave out some miniscule detail such as the need to flex the wrists during the ‘third pull’ (NB: there is no fourth pull despite what some particularly misguided individuals seem to think).  I’ve also provided links to the best sources of English language information on the lifts, technique, how to do and learn them, etc.  If you want details, go there.  This is mainly background for tomorrow.

OL’ing Technique: Introduction

Sports can vary drastically in how much or how little technique plays a role in their successful performance.  Make no mistake, all sports have technique but some are relatively more or less sensitive to proper (and improper) technique than others. For example, it’s not uncommon to see some really ugly elite distance runners. It’s an activity where poorer technique can be overcome through sheer grinding work.  It’s also a fundamental human movement pattern which is probably why conditioning can overcome technique.  It’s also why running is easy to pick up.  The same can be said for cycling (which I described previously as seated running with gears).

In contrast, very, very little about the technique of Olympic lifting has anything to do with normal human movement patterns with one exception (the much vaunted triple extension) which I’ll discuss below.   In this sense it’s a lot like swimming and speedskating and that’s part of the reason I discussed both.  None of those three sports has much in common with normal human movement patterns and all three are exceedingly sensitive to technique (or the lack thereof). 

Quite in fact, they are all sports where an athlete with better technique will often demolish an athlete with better conditioning (of course, at the highest levels you always find highly developed technique and highly developed levels of conditioning).  Aerobic fitness only gets you so far in the pool if you can’t swim efficiently, whatever qualities are required for speed skating only gets you so far if you can’t put it into the ice and all the strength in the world only gets you so far in the Olympic lifts if your technique sucks.

As well, technique in the Ol’s has been developing and evolving over the years as lifters figured out the best way to lift a barbell from floor to either the shoulders (clean) or overhead (snatch).   Much of this occurring when the Eastern European countries really started focusing on world sport in the 60′s and 70′s (keep these years in mind) and started doing a lot of biomechanical analysis into the sport and what the best way to do things were.

And, again, while I’m not going to detail everything (see my sources) here, I do want to look broadly at lifting technique, at least as it stands in the current era.  None of this is to suggest that lifting technique won’t continue to evolve (for example, consider the development of the squat jerk) or change but at this point, as with most sports, it’s pretty well refined.

The lifts are typically divided into 6 distinct phases, mostly for convenience and recognize that these are all just separations of the same continuous movement.  I’m going to look at each to one degree or another, mainly to note where interesting things happen or issues that are determinant in successful importance are relevant.  As well, I’ll point out places where misconceptions about the lifts or what is happening often occur.

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The Start

Now, both lifts start with the bar on the floor and the lifter in a position not unlike (but certainly not identical) to a deadlift position.  Arms are wider in the snatch and closer in the clean due to how the bar is caught (a wider hand position means not having to pull the bar as high in the snatch) and this impacts on starting hip position and leg drive for the two movements.  But both share the same basic characterstics.  

The main thing to note here (especially as this distinguishes both movements from current elite deadlifting technique) is that the shoulders are well in front of the bar.  As well, the torso is locked and arched.  Rounding at the start results in a loss of power to the bar.  Here’s a fairly picture perfect start position in the snatch.  Note the straight arms, flat back and shoulders in front of the bar.  This comes from the cover of Arthur Dreschler’s book, sourced below.

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Snatch Start Position

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First and Second Pulls

From the start position, the lifter begins the lift by breaking inertia to break the bar off the floor, moving to knee level and then past (at which point something called a Double Knee Bend which I’m not explaining) occurs; this combination of movements comprises the first and second pull (and most analysis breaks them into two segments but remember that this is just an overview).

Without going into a lot of unnecessary details, here’s what you need to realize, the first and second pull are a means to an end, a way of getting the bar into the important position which is often called the ‘power’ or ‘explode’ position (called the third pull by many).

I make this distinction because the first and second pull of the clean are superficially very similar to at least some styles of deadlift (for example the Clean Style Deadlift described here).  But they aren’t the same and here’s why: in the deadlift, the end point is at lockout and the goal of the movement is simply to get the bar from floor to full extension.  This allows lifters to do things (such as get the shoulders behind the bar earlier) that don’t work in the Olympic lifts where the lifter attempts to keep the shoulders in front of the bar for as long as possible. 

Because while the deadlift stops at full extension, this is really when the OL’s start (in a certain sense).  Because once the bar reaches the explode/power position the lifter now explodes, effectively throwing the bar up into the air.   And this is where the real action in the OL’s happens.   And since success or failure in an OL is determined by how much weight they can successfully throw high enough to catch (see next section) it is a rare lifter indeed that will miss an OL off the floor. 

Because in the OL’s, your’e limited by the amount of weight you can throw in the air from the explode position and this should always be less than what you can lift to that position.   The only lifters who miss off the floor are either injured or have been training too much from the hang and have lost leg drive.  In the deadlift, you can have a weak spot anywhere in the movement and it’s sometimes the floor.

In any case, to give you some idea of what’s going on, here is a female OL’er just finishing her first pull and about to start her second pull in the snatch.  Note the wide grip, loose/straight arms, flat back and shoulders in front of the bar.

I can't think of a witty caption for this.

One point that I really want to restate is this: the first and second pull of the lifts are really just a means to an end; they have as their real goal putting the bar in the right position for the next phase of the lift.  As I mentioned above, they are almost never limiting (though the movement around the knee can be technically problematic) for an OL unless a lifter has been injured or done really imbalanced training or something. 

Because the whole enchilada of the OL’s, the single part of the movement that determines success or not, is the next phase of the lift.  Because hopefully after a proper first and second pull to arrive in the power or explode position where the real insanity of the movements start.

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The Explode

Because at this point in the movement, the lifter now extends upwards (and often slightly backwards) in what is sort of like a jump with the bar in the hands.  It’s about the only part of the Ol’s that look anything like a normal human movement in the sense that many sports rely on what is often called triple extension (extension at the hips, knees and ankles).  Here’s what it looks like.

Kriss Kross Will Make You Jump Jump

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I’ll note only in passing that there has been much debate over the role or benefit of going up on the toes during this part of the movement with many great lifters doing one or the other and the current trend to remain more flat footed than in previous years for reasons I’m not getting into. 

This important bit is that the lifter has now exploded up (and usually a little bit back) and effectively thrown the bar into the air;  it is now a ballistic missle.  Please note that the force to make this happen occurs through the action of the legs and  back and the arms are minimally, if at all, involved beyond connecting the lifter to the bar (and no I’m not addressing early arm bend).  This is not a delt or arm movement; well, it shouldn’t be in any case.

Now let’s back up to high school physics and what happens in a situation like this.  If the lifter were to let go of the bar what you’d see happen is the bar would continue to rise (based on it’s initial velocity and weight) before stalling out and then falling back to the floor because of that gravity thing.

But since the sport is weightlifting and not weight throwing, that’s not what happens.  Because the lifter doesn’t let go of the bar; rather he has to find a way to get the bar  to either the finishing snatch position (above the head on locked arms) or the clean position (essentially a front squat position).  I’ll deal with the jerk briefly below.

Now, if the weight were light enough, the lifter could conceivably throw/pull it high enough to catch it more or less standing up.  Or perhaps by slightly bending the knees if it was a little bit lower.  This is actually a related set of movements called a power clean and power snatch (defined as catching the bar with the legs any higher than a half squat).    Here’s a power snatch to give you an idea.

But catching it that high limits how much weight you can use and recall the point of this: to lift the most weight.   Which means that since the bar can’t go up, the lifter has to go down, catching the bar in a full (or very close to it) squat position.  Read that again, after throwing the bar UP the lifter has to now go DOWN underneath it.  And he doesn’t have long before that gravity thing will pull the bar too low to catch.  In fact, he’s got about 0.2 seconds to go from full extension to low enough to catch the bar.  Half an eyeblink.

Which means that he has to rapidly switch from exploding up to, effectively, ‘jumping/pulling himself’ down.  And this takes split second timing as well; if he goes too early, he compromises bar height and position and will usually put the bar out front.

If he overpulls, he loses valuable time to get under the bar because he’s not getting any extra bar height but he is waiting to start moving underneath; the hyper extension also tends to put the bar too far back (some lifters do this though). The best lifters can finish the explode and instantaneously switch to moving under the bar at exactly the right moment.   Watch the videos from yesterday.

But fundamentally this is why squat movements surpassed split movements in terms of technique: the squat let lifters catch the bar lower in the snatch and clean which meant the weight didn’t have to be lifted as high which let people lift more weight which was the goal of the sport. 

The only reason that the squat jerk hasn’t come to prominence over the split or power jerk is that it’s too tricky of a move for most to consistently perform with the weights used in the clean and jerk.   The tiniest deviation in bar position and the lift will be lost (there is more ‘wiggle’ room in the split jerk because the base of support is longer front to back).

So the lifter has to get under the bar in the split second between throwing it into the air and it coming back down.  How does he accomplish this magic trick?  That’s the next phase of the movement.

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The Squat Under/Third Pull

The answer is that, for a brief moment, the lifter will actually un-weight themselves, briefly lifting their feet off the floor so that they are no longer in contact with the platform.  During this time the lifter continues to exert force on the bar and this is about the only time that the arms play much of a role.  But due to that whole inertia thing and the bar weighing more than the lifter, something neat happens when you combine the lifter being unweighted but continuing to pull against the bar (or push in the case of the jerk).

Because now instead of the lifter moving the bar, the bar will move the lifter.  That is, by continuing to pull ‘up’ on the bar, the end result is the lifter pulling themselves down (and yes, I’m simplifying this, OL purists please do not get annoyed).  Or as Yakov Smirnov would have said “In Soviet Russia, bar lowers you.”  

As this happens, the lifter will rapidly replace his feet on the floor (this is the genesis of the common ‘foot stomp’) because unless he does this he can’t exert force on the bar to bring it back under control.

I’d note that while he’s doing this he also has to relax/bend his legs enough to sink down into the squat position while he continues to exert force upwards (or at least against) the bar.  As all of this is going on the lifter is also bending his knees (while pulling UP on the bar which is a lot harder than you think; pushing UP with one part of your body while the other half is moving DOWN) to sink down into the squat position.  And this all has to happen quickly enough to get under the bar for the next phase of the movement.

So let’s sum up the movement so far: first pull, second pull, EXPLODE to throw the bar into the air, momentarily unweight as you keep pulling to move yourself under a bar that is rapidly slowing down, get your feet back on the floor (while squatting under and pushing UP on the bar at the same time) to catch a heavy bar crashing down on you.  No problem.  Right.  Now what happens?

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The Catch/Recovery

So the bar has been thrown, the lifter unweighted, got into a squat position the bar has stopped going up and is coming back down and/or being brought under control.  We’ll assume here that the bar was thrown high enough in the first place which is not at all guaranteed.  Many lifts are lost solely because the bar height is insufficient and/or the lifter doesn’t get low enough fast enough.  But let’s look at what happens if the bar can actually be caught and here the snatch and clean differ slightly.

The Snatch

The main issue with the snatch is bar position and keep in mind that it has to be caught overhead with locked arms and stabilized.  This entails it being in a fairly specific position which is why the bar path is so crucial here.  The bar basically has to go up and then ‘slot in’ on top of the lifter. 

Now, within some small limits, if the bar is forward or back the lifter can get it under control.  He may duck walk a bit or shift his weight to get the bar back under control.  If it’s too far in front or in back, he’s going to miss the lift.  Even if he had the power to throw it high enough.  The technique here is exacting and lifters having an off day in the snatch can and will miss every lift even if their strength or power are sufficient just because the bar is out of position.  And you really can’t save it if it’s out of position without some superhuman efforts.

Of course, even if it’s in position, the lifter has to have the ability to stabilize it overhead (again, the arms are locked).  You can look at the video of Dimas from yesterday to see how hard he’s working to keep the bar stable.  But assume all of this has happened, now the lifter is sitting at the bottom of an overhead squat.

Now, since the weights are lighter in the snatch, there should never ever be a problem with recovering from the bottom in terms of leg strength per se.  The lift isn’t simply limited by that (it’s limited by getting the bar height, catching and stabilizing it).  And you will often see lifters sit at the bottom briefly to get the bar under control before standing up for this reason.  There’s simply no reason to rush.

In other situations, lifters will start standing up immediately, often this can allow them to save a minimally out of position bar since they can use shifts in their body position to bring the bar back under control.  But it’s not required from a strength standpoint. 

But now, standing up, the lifter has to simply get the feet on the line, hold the bar overhead (look side to side if you’re Dimas and want to show off) and wait for the refs to give him the down signal.

The Clean

The clean is more complicated so let’s look at that.  In the clean the bar has been thrown and is then caught in a front squat position with the bar on the shoulders, the elbows having whipped underneath it on the catch as the lifter moves into the squat position. In an ideal world, the timing and bar position is such that the lifter can get a bounce out of the bottom of the front squat to facilitate standing up.  And unless something has gone wrong, a lifter won’t ever deliberately pause at the bottom (as they might in the snatch) because there’s no benefit to doing so.

To understand why consider how much more you can squat with a bit of a bounce versus a dead pause at the bottom.  It can easily be 5-10% difference in weight depending on a host of factors.  By bouncing you use less force to move more weight due to the impact of elastic recoil and a plyometric effect.

And this is important for at least two related reasons.  First and foremost the weights are heavier and the lifter has just made a maximum exertion, it’s possible for leg strength to be limiting in the squat clean recovery.  Secondarily, the lifter still has to do the jerk to complete the lift; any energy he can save by bouncing out of the squat is energy he has left for the jerk.  Lifters who exhaust themselves standing up from the squat clean often can’t make the jerk.  This is about as good as it gets (note that Dimas uses the power jerk)

But being able to catch a good bounce is predicated on a number of factors, not the least of which is the bar being in the right position during the catch.  If the bar is out front (and this can occur for myriad reason), it can make recovery from the front squat a real bitch; the upper back gets rounded, the lifter may tip forward, the lever arm is greater.  Either way it’s a bad thing if the bar is out front. 

If it’s too far back it can knock the lifter on his ass or, in some cases, cause him to black out by blocking blood flow although this is fairly rare.  Ideally though the bar will loop back, be caught in a perfect front squat position allowing the lifter to not only catch the bar but get a nice rebound out of the bottom (as shown in the video above). 

Make no mistake, recovering the squat clean can be related to pure leg strength but there is also a timing aspect (catching the bounce just right as the bar is trying to pin you down), an elastic aspect (getting a good rebound out of the bottom), and a technique aspect (related to having the bar in the right position).   Quite in fact, lifters with better/more consistent technique often get by with far less excess leg strength than lifters with poorer technique: they don’t need the pure leg strength because the bar is always in the right position for an easy rebound. 

At least one great Soviet lifter had a front squat that was something like 10kg above his best clean and jerk and had no problem recovering the squat clean.  Another had a front squat 50kg above his best clean and jerk and had all kinds of problems.  The difference was technique.

But let’s assume everything went right, the lifter caught the clean, caught the bounce and is now standing with the barbell across his shoulders. He may make some adjustments to foot or hand position but now he has to jerk it overhead.  The jerk is usually divided into the same 6 steps but I’m going to just summarize them since the concept is the same even if the movement is not.

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The Jerk

After reaching the top, the lifter will usually take a brief rest, at the very least he needs to let the weights stop oscillating before starting his jerk.  The feet and hands may also be adjusted slightly for reasons I won’t go into.  The lifter then gets tight with his chest up before doing a preparatory dip, not too low and not too shallow.  

This sets up for a vertical explosion where he uses hip and knee extension to drive the bar up and off his shoulders.  The bar is now a ballistic missle again and the lifter will once again get underneath it by unweighting himself briefly (by lifting his feet from the platform, either splitting them or jumping them out sideways) as he continues to push up on the bar; this has the end result of pushing him down.

Again, he has to replace his feet quickly on the platform to get control of the bar and this happens in a split second.  Catching the bar with locked arms, he then recovers both feet on the same line until judges decide if the lift was legal or not.   So again it’s a pattern of setup, dip, explode, throw bar, unweight, go under the bar, reset feet and catch.

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Do Or Do  Not Do, There is No Try

There is a semi-related point I want to make about the Olympic lifts here that often goes underappreciated by those involved in the other strength sports.  And that is that, unlike other movements in the weight room, the OL’s are by and large a very go/no go affair.  That is, lift success tends to either happen or not with very little middle ground.  Ok, this isn’t making sense.

Consider a lifter doing a maximum squat who may get stuck in the middle for a few seconds, grinding and grinding in the sticking point.  They might make it through they might not make it through but they can get stuck and will continue to work to try and get the weight to a place that lets them make the lift.  The same holds for benches and deadlifts and just about any other major weight training movement.

The Olympic lifts are not like this.  As often as not the bar height isn’t there.  When this happens the bar is simply dropped; the lifter can’t force it or grind it or anything.  It just doesn’t go high enough and the lifter will simply let go.  But even if the bar height is sufficient, a lift is often missed and again, it’s a very go/no go kind of thing.  This is arguably more true for the snatch where an out of bar position won’t allow recovery.  Here’s a snatch being missed behind, for example.

Even in the clean the same basic thing can happen and about the only ‘grinding’ you’ll ever see in an OL is during the front squat recovery (remember, the snatch recovery will never be limited by leg strength).  But on the clean itself, or the jerk that won’t happen (in the jerk the bar will simply be dropped in back if the arms don’t lock instantly).  This is as much due to the nature of the lifts as the judging: any grinding in a lift would get red lights outside of the squat recovery so lifters simply don’t bother.

But this aspect of the lifts, the go/no go nature of the lifts has major consequences for the physiological requirements of the sport in several ways which is what I’ll be discussing tomorrow.  It also causes another oddity, often a lifter will go from making a very ‘easy’ (read: completed) lift with one weight and then fail utterly with what seems an insignificant increase in weight (1-2.5 kg or 2.2-5.5 lbs). 

I mean, you might be adding 1% or less to the bar and suddenly the lift goes from ‘no problem’ to ‘can’t make it’.  You lose that extra couple of cm of bar height, the bar just doesn’t quite get there (or you press it out which is illegal).  And you go from success to failure in an almost binary fashion.  And you just don’t see that in other weight room movements.  But the go/no go nature of the OL’s makes it happen.

The S-Shaped Pull

As one final note today, I want to point out an oddity of the Olympic lifts which is that roughly 40 years of analysis and experimentation has led to the conclusion that the absolute BEST way to perform the lifts is to have the bar move in what’s called an S-shape pattern as shown below.  That is the bar sweeps back and then forward and then back again to be caught as shown below (you can also see it in the video above) and this occurs in both the snatch and clean (the jerk trajectory is different).

I mention this explicitly because some often make a rather simplistic argument based on physics that the bar should be pulled in a straight line due to the logic that ‘the shortest distance between two points is a straight line’ and hence that will let you move the most weight.  Sadly this ignores the basic fact that the body moves rotationally, not linearly.  Joints open and close in a circular fashion.   Linear motion is achieved in humans through translated rotational motion.

As well, the way that the center of gravity shifts forwards and back in an OL makes a straight line pull less effective; again you can see this in the clean and jerk video I posted yesterday, how the lifter’s weight shifts back and forth through the clean movement.  The S-curve may be longer  in a purely physics sense but it’s superior in a real world and physiological sense because of how human biomechanics work.

And not only has every analysis of lifting technique generated this as the optimal technique, the real world fact is this: every top lifter in the last 3-4 decades of the sport uses it.  While that doesn’t prove anything (sometimes athletes are dead wrong in what they do in sport), it’s pretty suggestive that this is the way to clean or snatch a barbell properly.

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Your Technique is Good but You Lack Confidence

Ignoring the insane technical requirements of OL’ing, there is something else I want to mention relative to the lifts which is this: doing all of the above with anything but the most trivial of weights takes a staggering amount of confidence (or perhaps better phrased a ‘lack of fear’).  I want you to think about it objectively, you are taking a heavy barbell and throwing it into the air.  If you were letting it go that would be one thing.  But now you are expected to effectively jump/dive back under it as it’s coming down to try and crush you.

Lifters often find themselves balking when the weights get heavy, the fear reflex kicks in and they either don’t pull the bar as hard as they should or they don’t really go for it to get under the bar.  And even if they have the technique, the raw strength, the power and everything else, the lift will still be missed. 

We might compare this to something like gymnastics: think about a girl throwing herself into a back flip both off and back onto a 4″ beam (the balance beam). You can’t hesitate, you can’t hold back.  Because if you hold back you really get hurt.  You only succeed by committing to the movement 100% and there is often that part of your brain reminding you that “This is a really fucking dumb thing to be doing.”

But that mention of 100% brings me to a final oddity before I wrap up today.

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Sometimes Less is More

The following is a point made to me by a good friend, an OL’er himself who both coaches and competes.  He’s also given me invaluable feedback on this article series but prefers to remain anonymous.  The point he made to me is this: due to the nature of the lifts, the technique required and the critical nature of a proper bar path, it is often better to pull/explode a little less than maximum especially if that allows the lifter to maintain a better bar path or trajectory.

Put differently, sometimes when athletes try to go full gorilla on the bar, they end up being pulled out of position, losing body posture or bar position/trajectory.  And all of that strength and power don’t matter if the bar is out of position (again arguably more on the snatch than on the clean and jerk but it still applies to both).  In that case, going at 90% but maintaining better technique often works better from the standpoint of making a successful lift (of course being able to give 100% effort AND maintain bar path is ideal). 

All of which is really just a consequence of the exacting nature of OL’ing technique and the nature of how the lifts are or aren’t made.  And this really separates them from the other strength sports where slight deviations can be overcome with brute strength.  A deadlifter isn’t going to pull at less than maximal effort for fear of losing the bar, same with a squat or a bench.  In a snatch, a maximum pull off the floor (and there is an aspect of pull rhythm that I am not getting into) is just as likely to make the lift more likely to miss as it is anything good because it disrupts technique. 

That’s right, under certain conditions, OL’ing strength sport where it can be better not to use maximum strength.  Whoa.
 

Sources
The Weightlifting Encylopedia by Arthur Dreschler.  THE single most comprehensive book on the sport of Olympic Weighlifting. There is also a companion DVD.  Note that this book is insanely detailed and shows the level of depth you can really get into with these movements.   For literally every point I made above Dreschler spends pages examining every possible nuance.  It’s that kind of sport.
Olympic Weighfliting by Greg Everett.  Another excellent book on weighlifting technique.   There is a companion DVD and I have reviewed both the book (first edition) and DVD here on the site.  While not nearly as detailed as Dreschler’s book, it’s a bit easier to follow and has lots and lots of good picture series to illustrate what’s going on.
Weightlifting Olympic Style by Tommy Kono.  Perhaps the best introductory book on OL technique.  This is by far the least technical of the three books in this list but what it lacks in endless detail it makes up for in sheer awesomeness.
Glenn Pendlay Olympic Lifting Technique DVD by Glenn Pendlay.  I reviewed it on the site and highly recommend it for anybody wanting to learn the basics of the lifts quickly and easily.

And that’s a very broad overview of Olympic lifting technique, mainly I went through it to faciliate tomorrow’s discussion of the physical characteristics needed (or not needed) to succeed at the sport.  It’s all coming together now.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 3.

This was even true for America which despite it’s completely decentralized (and often screwed up) approach to sport is often successful or outright dominant, at least in certain types of sports.  There I looked at too much background in terms of geography, culture, economics, etc. all as background for discussing the Big Three sports: football, baseball and basketball.  Of those three, only basketball has been consistently contested at the highest levels.  And there America is simply dominant beyond description. 

The main point of discussing those three was not only to show how a decentralized system can still produce but also to point out how those three sports have so massively impacted on other sports in this country.  Their huge incentives and the rest are a monstrous draw for the people who go into sports (for financial reasons especially) and that generally means our large underclass.  Meaning, as often as not, minorities.  Who, as often as not, are physiologically wired to succeed at certain types of sports.

From there I moved to track and field, a non-professional sport that we are also utterly successful in and have been consistently since the early part of the 20th century.  As much as anything some of that seems to be related to ‘overflow’ from the big three.  With a massive high-school and collegiate tradition (meaning, if nothing else, incentives in the form of education), athletes who don’t go into the Big Three still have an outlet.  The monstrous number of events and potential physiologies that can be accommodated allow that many more to potentially succeed.  Subjected to the insane collegiate competition schedule, thy are honed to an edge and go to the Olympics to kick ass.

Then I looked at swimming, the first ‘exception’ to all of the above.  It’s a sport pursued historically and predominantly by middle and upper-class whites (and only recently by minorities at all), a group that rarely competes for explicit financial or even educational reasons.  They have money and seem to come from a strong internal drive/desire for individual competition.  They also go into the collegiate system but there they often choose schools based on the swimming program rather than education per se.

That led into a discussion of cyclng in the US, a sport that has always been fairly niche with small numbers; again pursued primarily by middle or upper class whites. And where, for reasons primarily dictated by geography, we had talent but it wasn’t prepared to succeed in the competitive professional European ranks, at least not until recently.   Mainly it was an illustration of how a sport can change in America; more specifically, how a specific individual (Lance Armstrong) was able to make America care about a sport singlehandedly.

I finished up by looking at the oddest exception of all, US Speedskating. Contributing the largest number of American winter Olympic medals, we also are (barely) at the top of the leader board.  It’s an exceedingly niche sport with a tiny number of skaters, no access, no coaching, an incompetent federation and no incentives. 

It seems to contradict everything that came before it although the specifics of the situation (the small Minnesota/Wisconsin area) may make it more similar to the other systems that it first seemed.  As much as anything it was to show that a sport can often succeed in spite of itself; I also wanted to show how a sport can manage to kill itself off as our success in the sport seems to be on the wane.

And with all of that finally out of the way I can look at Olympic lifting and will look at nothing else.  I’ll be looking at the same basic set of issues mainly to look at the sport in the US, both historically and in the modern era.  Part of the reason (besides being a wordy bastard) that I spent so much time on all of the background was that I see elements of each in the situation of OL’ing.

Which was the point of this nonsense from the outset, to show that the problems with Olympic lifting in this country are not simple (i.e. need more money, need more strength).  Nor are the solutions simple, assuming they even exist.  All of this and more I will look out as this series marches on.  And I’m restarting the series count with 1 so it doesn’t get too stupid.

Once again, I’ll start from the beginning.  I can’t assume that everyone reading this has a background in Olympic lifting, hell I can’t assume that anybody but me is still reading this at all.  But I’m going to cover some basics of the sport, competition, technique first just as background for the rest of it.  So, let’s go all the way back to the beginning

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A Very Brief History of Olympic Weightlifting

Since men started competing for fun (as I detailed previously), it’s likely that one thing that people sought to determine was who’s strongest.  It’s simply a function of competition and proximity bias.  Fast people want to see who’s fastest, endurance people who can go the furthest.  And big strong men want to know who’s the biggest and strongest.  And that entails lifting heavy things.  This tradition can be found in almost all cultures and still exists in many sports in varying guises.  The stones of strongman, various events in Highland games, etc.

Of course, at some point in the game, folks figured out that metal could be made into shapes and that made it a bit easier to lift than the strangely shaped rock down the road.  And weightlifting in some form or another was invented.  That would give way to barbells which would logically lead to folks doing the same sort of thing, seeing who could lift the biggest or heaviest weight.

According to my primary source (see below), the first competition in Olympic lifting were contested in the late 19th century with the first champion crowned in 1891.  At the time there were no weight classes, whomever lifted the most was the strongest.  It was competition at its most basic.  And the lifts contested early on weren’t what we typically think of when we think of Olympic weightlifting.

For example, here is one of the two lifts contested at the 1904 Olympic games called the all-around dumbbell lift (the other lift was the two-hand lift.  A grand total of 4 lifters from 2 countries competed: three Americans and one Greek. The three Americans swept the all-around dumbbell lift medals (the Greek guy didn’t enter) but the Greek took gold in the two-hand lift.

The key to strength is the mustache.

I’d note that much of the interest in weightlifting came out of the physical culture movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, this involved not only exercise but also health, nutrition and other issues.  For a particularly strange look at this particularly strange time, see the documentary The Road to Wellville.

The sport would continue to evolve and become an official Olympic sport by 1920.   By 1932 there were 5 weight classes and the sport was made up of three lifts: the overhead press, the clean and jerk and the snatch. All three lifts representing different ways of getting a weight overhead. It was still just called weightlifting though;  I imagine “Putting crap overhead” lifting just didn’t have the same ring to it. 

But I wonder, semi-seriously, if there isn’t some innate evolutionary drive to wanting to put stuff overhead.  Something about holding something overhead triumphantly to show that you owned.  Like this.

Throughout the first 40 some odd years of competition, the three lifts would be contested with the results being based on the heaviest weight lifted in each of the three; the lifter who totalled the most weight (i.e. had the highest sum of each of their best lifts) was the overall winner although you could also win individual events. 

It’s important to realize that the press would be dropped from competition in 1972 (and keep this date at least roughly in mind as we go forwards) due to some severe problems with judging the lift (the lift had become almost a standing bench press due to the allowance of layback).   From that point on, the sport of Olympic weighlifting would be contested only with the snatch and clean and jerk and this change caused a fundamental change in the nature of the sport that I’ll address in detail later.  Let’s look briefly at each of the three lifts (I’ll address technique tomorrow).

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The Press

In the press, after cleaning the weight (pulling it from the floor to the shoulders), the weight was pressed overhead to lockout with no prior knee bend.  Note the layback in the following video of Serge Reding doing a 228kg (502 lb) clean and press; it was problems with the layback and judging what a press was that led to it’s eventually being dropped from the sport.

As I mentioned above, the press was dropped from competition officially in 1972 and this had a number of consequences for the sport that I’ll mention eventually (and I will be doing some jumping back and forth from the pre-1972 to post-1972 era for reasons you’ll see). 

In the modern era, discussion of the Olympic lifts centers around the other two lifts: the snatch and clean and jerk.  From a practical standpoint, there might as well have been two separate sports of Olympic lifting: pre-1972 OL’ing (with the three lifts) and post-1972 OL’ing (with only the two).  Again, keep that year in the back of your mind.

While the press was really a strength move, the snatch and clean and jerk are more explosive.  And they share a similar characteristic in that, after the bar is lifted from the floor to what is termed the power or ‘explode’ position the bar is literally thrown into the air while the lifter moves underneath it which I’ll look at tomorrow when I overview technique.

All that really differs between the lifts (and you can actually think of the modern sport as three lifts: the snatch, the clean and the jerk where the jerk simply follows the clean) is where the bar ends up after the lifter throws it into the air (and then moves underneath it).

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The Snatch

In the snatch, the weight is lifted in a single motion from floor to overhead at arms length (the arms must be locked for the lift to be legal).  Effectively it is ‘snatched’ overhead.  This requires that the bar be thrown high enough for the lifter to move underneath it with locked out arms.  Since the bar has to go higher to achieve lockout, the weights lifted in the snatch are typically about 20% lower than in the clean and jerk.  To illustrate this movement, here is a video of the great Greek lifter Pyrros Dimas performing the snatch.

In addition to generating lots of infantile giggling when you mention it, the snatch is considered one of, if not the, hardest activities in sport.  The movement happens in a fraction of a second and the slightest error in technique can cause the weight to be lost in front or in back even if it’s high enough to get under it.   That’s assuming you can generate enough power to throw the weight high enough in the first place.

Despite the lighter weights, the snatch requires/generates the higher power outputs of any lifting movement (far more than the technically incorrectly named ‘powerlifting’).  For this reason, many strength coaches use the snatch (or some derivative movement such as the power snatch, with the bar being caught in a half or partial squat) for this reason; to train athletes to generate high power outputs.

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The Clean and Jerk

The clean and jerk is actually two movements that, for many purposes, can be considered separately; they are only considered a single lift in that you do the jerk after the clean.  The clean is similar to the snatch in that the bar starts on the floor and is lifted into the power position before being thrown as the lifter moves under it.  The difference is that the bar is caught on the shoulders.  Since the bar needn’t go as high, this allows more weight to be lifted.   Again, about 20% more than the snatch on average (and at least one lighter lifter has done a triple bodyweight clean).

After standing up with the weight, the lifter then dips (performs a slight knee bend) prior to throwing the bar overhead (the jerk) and moving underneath it with locked arms (the ‘jerk’).  A key aspect of the jerk, separating it from the press, is that the jerk happens nearly instantaneously.  The bar isn’t pressed out but rather thrown overhead as the lifter goes underneath it.  In fact, pressing the bar out will get the lift disqualified depending on the strictness of the judging.  The elbows have to lock immediately and here’s a video of a clean and jerk.

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For completeness, I’d mention that there are technically three ways of jerking the weight although the split jerk shown above is by far the most commonly used.  Some lifters power jerk where the feet are not split and the bar is caught overhead in a partial squat; the feet stay side by side.  As well, a small minority of lifters perform a squat jerk where, after the bar is thrown upwards, they squat all the way down to catch the bar.  When successful, it’s amazing to watch.  It’s also very easy to lose the lift.  Because it’s more stable because of a larger base of support, the split jerk is used by the majority of lifters. The three types of jerks are shown below.

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SPLIT!

POWER!

SQUAT!

Squat vs. Split Technique

You might notice that the videos of the snatch and clean and jerk show the lifters catching the bar (either on shoulders or overhead) in a full squat position sometimes called the squat snatch or squat clean.  I bring this up as it was not always the case.  In the earliest days of the sport, most caught their cleans or snatches in a split position as shown in the next video.  This was called the split snatch (har har har) or the split clean.

It was somewhere around the 1950′s or so that the big transition from split cleans and snatches gave way to the squat technique.  The benefit of the squat catch being that the bar didn’t have to be pulled nearly as high for the lifter to get into it.  The disadvantage being that the squat catch required much more flexibility and mobility than the split clean of old. 

Many lifters who were around during the transition weren’t able to make it because they hadn’t spent the years developing the needed flexibility and mobility to do the full squat position.  In modern times, the split technique is almost never seen although at least one top female American lifter uses the split clean.

Now, inasmuch as the lifts were and are used for various reasons, I’m mainly going to focus here on actual OL’ing competition.  Because that’s what’s really relevant in terms of the overall thrust of this article: competition.

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Competition

Competitions in OL’ing certainly seem relatively simple although, like all sports, they have their nuances (most of which I’ll be ignoring).  The basics, mind you are to lift the most weight; that’s the fundamental goal of the sport. Towards that goal each lifter is given three attempts in each lift to lift the most weight that they can a single time.   It is the total weight lifted that determine the overall winner.

So when the three lifts were still being competed, whomever lifted the largest total (press + snatch + clean and jerk) won the overall in their weight class.  When the press was eliminated it was simply the total of the snatch and clean and jerk.  Lifters can also medal in the individual lifts so one lifter might win the snatch, another the clean and jerk and a third the total. And you do see specialists, or at least lifters with relatively better performance in one or the other lifts.

Because while the lifts certainly share similarities, they are different.  The snatch is more of a speed/technique lift.  Certainly it requires strength and explosive power but it’s a technician’s lift and since the weights are lighter, it’s more about speed and explosion than strength per se.  The clean and jerk, in contrast, is a more of a strength lift (it’s not called the King of Lifts for nothing).  Technique is crucial but since the weights are heavier more raw strength and power is needed.   And it’s not uncommon to see lifters who are relatively better at one than the other.

And while it’s usually best, from the point of winning the overall, to be good at both, it’s a little more complicated than that.  This is because, the different lifts contribute differently to the total because of the weights involved.  The snatch allows the least weight to be used and you rarely see huge differentials between athletes at the same level. 

The clean allows for larger numbers and a lifter who is ‘behind after the snatch’ can often make up weight with an amazing clean and jerk (in the same way that a guy with a huge deadlift can make up for moving less weight in the bench press in powerlifting).   So someone who is a relatively weaker snatcher (hee hee) may make it up with a monstrous clean and jerk.  It doesn’t really work the other way.

Note: When the press was still part of lifting competition, weights were roughly similar to what was used in the clean. Meaning that lifters who were better in the relatively more strength focused clean/press and clean/jerk tended had an advantage over the relatively more technique/speed oriented snatch.  And since you had two strength lifts to the one speed lift, this meant that stronger guys would tend to be superior to technical guys.  This is a very relevant point going forwards to keep it in mind.

As mentioned, lifters are divided up by weight classes and only lifters within the same weight class lift against one another; this is simply an attempt to equalize the events.  It would be hard for a 60kg (132 lb) lifter to compete against a 100kg (220 lb) lifter.  Within each weight class, if two lifters lift the same amount of weight, the lighter lifter will still ‘win’ on lower bodyweight.   It can get even more complicated than that based on lot numbers but I’m not getting into it (I’m not sure I understand it well enough in the first place).

Lifters weigh in the day of their competition and this actually impacts on what lifters go through to make weight in terms of dehydration and rehydration.  Most lifters train at a weight slightly above their competition weight and reduce weight through weight dieting or dehydration to make weight.  Quite in fact, the Bulgarians OL’ing team was often caught for diuretic abuse in the drug tests; they were using them to get their lifters into the proper weight class.

It’s worth mentioning that the weight classes have gone through many revisions over the history of the sport.  Perhaps one of the most far reaching changed occurred in 1993.  Due to problems with drug use and the fact that clean lifters couldn’t touch the old world records, weightlifting threw out all the old weight classes and created new ones to reset the record books (because sports fans want to see records fall); it also eradicated a near 100 year history in the sport.  I’ll come back to this when I touch on the doping issue later.

Unlike powerlifting where flights are performed and the weight can go up and back down (at the start of the next flight), in OL’ing, within any given weight class, the weight can only go up.  So the weight on the bar will start at the lightest attempt and then either stay the same or go up; it can’t ever go back down.  Once the bar is loaded, lifters have one minute to start the lift; if they fail to do this the lift is forfeited and the same rules above apply.

After an individual lifter takes his or her attempt, he can either raise the weight for his next attempt (whether or not he made it or missed it) or keep the weight the same (if the lifter missed it and wants to take it again).   If someone else is lifting the same weight on the bar, they go next.  If not, the next highest weight on the bar is put on and the same process continues. Again this goes from lowest to highest with the only thing that can happen is that the weight on the bar stays the same or goes up. 

One consequence of this is the above is that sometimes lifters follow themselves in competition.  So imagine you have three lifters who have put in 100, 105 and 110 kg as their attempts.  Lifter 1 goes first with 100kg. If he misses, he may take 100kg again. Since he’s still the lowest weight he goes again.  If he makes it but only wants to try 102.5 kg, he still goes again because he’s still lowest.  If he goes to 105kg, the other lifter goes first and then he goes.  When a lifter follows themselves, they get 2 minutes between lifts. 

And trust me there’s way more to it than this involving counting attempts, changing weight on the bar (to either stall for time or for strategic reasons) that I don’t even pretend to understand.  It does make following a competition hard sometimes because you’re never quite sure who’s winning or losing (and there’s no easy scoreboard to indicate it).  It’s a sport that, by and large, Americans don’t ‘get’ for this reason.  Too hard too follow, too confusing, no clear winner and loser and the whole going after yourself defies American sports logic.  Either compete at the same time or alternate; that we get.

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Judging

The goal of OL’ing is not just to lift the weight, it has to be lifted within specifically set rules (all of which have changed over the years).  And that means that the sport has to have judges, in this case two side judges and one head judge who stands in front of the lifter. 

They are highly trained, highly qualified and decide based on a red (fail) or white (pass) system whether or not the lift was done according to the rules (powerlifting would adopt this system when it was developed later in the 20th century).   It also means that the sport which should be based on nothing but weight lifted has an added subjective element to it that I’m sure causes lots of sports arguments in countries that care about the sport.  I wonder if OL enthusiasts call the judges ‘blind as a bat’ like Americans do with baseball umpires.

In any case we have three judges watching the lift and deciding if it meets the rules with a simple light setup.  Two or more white lights and the lift is passed. Two or more reds and it fails.   And as in any sport with a subjective element, hudges aren’t perfect nor are they consistent.  Sometimes it’s loose, sometimes it’s strict.  Sometimes it changes during a meet because that’s the way real life is.

The rules are often insanely complicated and nuanced and very hard to explain or understand (I don’t pretend to understand most of them).   It doesn’t help that the lifts happen so fast that it’s hard to see supposed rules violations with the naked eye. One rule infraction I can explain is press-out.  If the elbows bend (or rebend) and the bar is physically pressed to arm’s length during the jerk, that’s a red light.   The same holds for the snatch, you can’t catch it on bent arms and then press it to lockout, it has to go from floor to overhead with no pressout.

There are many others and sometimes two lifts that look identical will get different sets of lights for reasons you’re not always sure of.   A friend (both a lifter and coach) recently went to US nationals and she couldn’t figure out why some lifts were passed and others were not.   And she understand the sport.  Good luck for non-lifters or non-enthusiasts to understand why Guy 1 got whites and Guy 2 didn’t and they both seem to have done the same thing (it doesn’t help that the lifts happen too quickly for the naked eye to really see what is going on).

But all of the above, the nature of the sport (2 lifts based on explosive power and most weight lifted one time) has some pretty strong implications for what is required in the sport.  Which is where I’ll pick up tomorrow.

Sources
Lift Up, History of Olympic Weightlifting.  Possibly the most comprehensive source for the history of the sport.  This is the site where the Abadjaev interview I linked to earlier came from.
Also special thanks to Glenn Pendlay and my other OL’ing obsessed friends for feedback and fact checking on this and other parts of this series.

And with that first overview of the sport of Olympic Weighlifting, I’ll cut it for today.  Tomorrow I want to get into a bit of detail of the technique of the lifts since it’s relevant to the specific physiological characteristics needed to be successful at the sport.  And you might see how that’s relevant to my overall topic.

Read why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 2.